Improvements in housing indicators in Census 2023

New Census 2023 data was released today, and I've spent most of the day looking at what's changed, and answering questions from journalists. The key area of interest for me - the changes to housing indicators in 2023. Here's a fairly brief overview of what I've found:

An increase in the home ownership rate!

The homeownership rate has increased, slightly, from 64.5% in 2018 to 66.0% in 2023. I'd quietly thought that this figure would improve, but wanted to wait to see the full data. Here's my comments to Interest.co.nz's Daniel Brunskill : https://www.interest.co.nz/property/130054/home-ownership-rates-rose-first-time-three-decades-due-better-affordability-2019

What's driven this improvement? I suspect it's a combination of better mortgage affordability (relative to incomes) in 2019, 2020, and 2021, coupled with higher building rates in recent years. Our data at Infometrics highlights the period of better mortgage affordability: https://rep.infometrics.co.nz/new-zealand/living-standards/housing-affordability

We've got healthier homes

Housing quality also improved, with damp houses (damp at least some of the time) declining from 21.5% of all houses in 2018 to 18.1% in 2023. Mouldy houses (with more than an A4 area of mould sometimes or always) went from 16.9% to 14.0%! And heat pump use also shot up, with 66.8% of houses having a heat pump in 2023, up from 47.3% in 2018. It's really encouraging to see that the Healthy Homes Standards have improved housing quality.

You know I can't live in your ghost houses!

Of course, there's always a lot of interest too in unoccupied dwellings - sometimes referred to as "ghost houses". As I told RNZ 's Money Correspondent Susan Edmunds , there were around 100,000 unoccupied private dwellings (around 111,000 unoccupied total dwellings) - with private unoccupied dwellings making up 10.8% of total private dwellings, higher than in 2013 and 2018. But, compared to 2013, there's been a larger increase in unoccupied private dwellings where the residents were away from the house on Census Night (so generally in use, just with no one home on Census Night). In 2013, 2.5% of private dwellings were like this, but this proportion had increased to 5.5% in 2023, likely as more people are using holiday homes and baches etc more than before, including for Working From Home.

The number of empty private dwellings (that has no one living there at present) has shifted from 8.0% of total private dwellings in 2013 to 5.3% in 2023. These houses can be empty for a few reasons, including because they're baches and holiday homes, or they're being renovated etc. Noticeably, there were a lot of empty homes in Auckland, Gisborne, and Hawke's Bay - highly likely due to weather (Cyclone Gabrielle in Gisborne and Hawke's Bay, and the earlier Auckland floods in Auckland), but also higher building rates (in Auckland), leaving some homes potentially counted as a dwelling, but not yet moved into etc.

Some more links

Here's the RNZ interview: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/529755/ghost-houses-100-000-dwellings-reported-empty-in-latest-census

And here's the full Stats NZ release: https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/home-ownership-increases-and-housing-quality-improves/