Building consents still weak

Friday, 29 August 2008

Residential construction remained in a funk last month with the number of consents issued for new houses just crawling up from June's 7-1/2-year low.

Figures published by Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) today show 1410 new housing units were authorised in July, the second-lowest monthly total since February 2001. In June 1362 were issued.

The residential building consents issued last month were valued at $491 million, down $188 million from July 2007.

In the past four years, there had been only five months with a monthly value below $500m, SNZ said.

Non-residential building consents in July were valued at $349m, down $4m on a year ago.

The trend for the number of new housing units had fallen 35 percent since June 2007, with the trend for the total value of residential building consents, which peaked at the same time as the number of consents, also continuing to decline.

For the year ended July, the number of residential building consents was down 15 percent from a year earlier, or down 14 percent with apartments excluded.

The value of the residential consents for the year was down 9.1 percent to $7.09 billion.

Non-residential buildings authorised last month were valued at $349m, down 1.2 percent from July 2007.

For the year, the value of non-residential consents rose 5.3 percent to $4.32b.

For all buildings, the value of consents was down 19 percent to $839m in July and down 4.2 percent to $11.41b for the year.

The Auckland and Canterbury regions had their lowest number of new dwelling consents for the past year at 237 and 217, respectively.

It was the third lowest month for Waikato with 199, but the second highest for Wellington with 220.

NZPA