Resources and tips for buying a house in Christchurch

I’ve spent 6 months of this year trying to buy a house, and during that time I’ve learned more about housing and real estate than I’ve ever wanted to. It’s been difficult and at times devastating, and I hope sharing some things I’ve learned could improve this process for others. Some of this is Christchurch-specific, and some of it is generic.

Important Maps

Christchurch District Plan Map - https://districtplan.ccc.govt.nz/?t=map
This covers:

  • Residential zoning, which dictates how densely populated/built out an area can get. Most areas are either Residential Medium Density, Residential Suburban Transitional Density, or Residential Suburban (RMD land is sought after by property developers for building blocks of flats on)
  • Flood management and flood extent zones
  • The Liquefaction management area, and other environmental/disaster management overlays
  • Heritage and cultural overlay areas

CCC Rates and Valuation Search - https://ccc.govt.nz/services/rates-and-valuations/rates-and-valuation-search
Occasionally an agent will go to great lengths to obscure/not present the RV of a property, usually because it would give an inaccurate impression of the property’s market value. This site will give you the RV of any property. Sometimes the address you need to put in here could vary from the letterbox address, e.g. if it’s a corner section with two addresses, or a flat with multiple numbering systems. 

Christchurch Liquefaction Viewer - https://apps.canterburymaps.govt.nz/ChristchurchLiquefactionViewer/
This presents the areas of the city most/least impacted by liquefaction, as well as some historical aerial photography showing liquefaction.

Natural Hazards Portal Claims Map - https://www.naturalhazardsportal.govt.nz/s/claims-map
Natural Hazards Commission (NHC) is the new name for EQC, and this map allows you to search how many claims have been lodged for a property. It can’t tell you the claim numbers or any additional information about the claims.

MBIE Technical Categories Map - https://mapviewer.canterburymaps.govt.nz/?webmap=9c63109b592c40828190b1f86cb5a2d3
Presents the TC rating of residential areas (TC3 is blue, TC2 is yellow, TC1 is grey) 

Central Record of State Owned Land - https://linz.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=8501fe601f7648718d0e3a2f3f1ed216
There are some suburbs that have very densely packed, well-defined patches of state housing, which will impact the expected value of properties in that area. It’s worth a quick check on here in case you’re looking at something affected by this, so you can adjust your price expectations accordingly. 

Property Search - https://propertysearch.canterburymaps.govt.nz/
This is a really interesting map that provides a number of historical aerial views of Christchurch, back as far as the 1940s, and sometimes 1920s. This can be useful to view the history of a property that has changed a lot over time 

Listed Land Use Register - https://llur.ecan.govt.nz/home
Outlines areas of land that have in the past been used for something that was potentially hazardous - the most frequent instance of this I came across was land that had been used as a market garden, so technically could have been used to store fertilizer

Common methods of sale

Auction

Pros:

  • You know who you’re bidding against, and how much they’re willing to pay
  • If you’re the only bidder, it just kinda turns into a negotiation

Cons:

  • High upfront cost/effort. Auctions are unconditional, the sale is final, and you have to have everything sorted - finance, solicitor’s approval, builder’s report, insurance. 
  • Because of the above, you may be more inclined to bid above what you are comfortable with (sunk cost fallacy etc)
  • The whole auction atmosphere is, in my opinion, designed to exploit the buyer

There are some lawyers that specialise in doing low-cost pre-auction and pre-deadline legal advice. The firm I used, Your Legal, provides a service that is $300 to do the pre-auction legal work, allowing you to bid at the auction with less upfront cost, and then only if you do win, do you have to pay for all the other stuff. Figuring this out was a game changer, and allowed me to make a successful pre-auction offer, knowing that I was only risking $300.   

Deadline sale

Pros:

  • Low upfront cost/effort. Any deadline offer you make can have as many conditions as you want. Your offer may be more attractive if it contains less conditions, but there is no requirement to have any conditions in particular. 

Cons:

  • You are essentially bidding blind against everyone. You don’t know what the vendor wants, and you don’t know what the other buyers are going to offer. This could result in you offering more than is necessary.
  • Your first offer has to be your best and highest offer. If your offer is declined, or it’s not the highest that is presented, the vendor has no obligation to negotiate with you. You get one shot.  

Asking price/offers over

  • What a dream, they just tell you what they want. Pretty rare, more common with lower priced properties and the lower-commission real estate agents (i.e. not-Harcourts)

EQC

Can be difficult to navigate, and I want to preface this by stating that I am really not an expert on this. Property law is really complicated.

Agents will typically provide EQC documentation, but the quality of this can vary wildly. Ideally, the agent or vendor will directly request the EQC documentation from the Natural Hazards Commission, which can take up to 20 working days. You will know that your documentation is directly from NHC if each page has “Released Under the Official Information Act 1982” at the top of each page. If the vendor is trying to sell quickly, or the agent can’t be bothered, you may be presented with vendor-supplied documentation, which will often be incomplete. This may not be an issue if the claims were straightforward. If you need to, you can directly request information about a property from NHC, through an OIA (Official Information Act) request: https://www.naturalhazards.govt.nz/contact-us/official-information-act-request-form/

TradeMe and other housing websites

The value estimation algorithms on homes.co.nz and oneroof.co.nz are simultaneously very important, and problematic. I think oneroof is considered more accurate. Both sites struggle with multi-dwelling properties, especially if they have been subdivided in an ad-hoc way. Take notice of the land area the website thinks is associated with the property; sometimes the whole section will be attributed to one flat, inflating the estimation. Make sure to check for every address permutation - if you can’t find 3A, look for 3, 3A, 3B, 1 / 3, 2 / 3. This can also be helpful if you are looking for past listings of a property, googling a different version of the house number can bring up more information. 

Under the hood, each TradeMe listing has a minimum value that dictates whether a listing will appear in a given search. This is true even if it is a deadline sale or auction that has no public-facing value. You can determine what this value is by: 

  • Searching a region of the map that contains your property in question
  • Sorting the results by lowest price
  • Finding the property in the list, and then finding the nearest results on either side that have a price on them. Usually you can pinpoint this value within 5-15k.

This value isn’t an asking price, it’s just the lowest-price audience they want to present the listing to. This price drops dramatically for auction listings - often being ~80-100k less than they expect to get at auction, in an attempt to get more people interested.

Hoping this helps someone, thanks for reading