A real estate agent yesterday sent me a PDF showing all the recent house sales in southern and eastern Wellington.

This one caught my eye

It is tiny, by almost any New Zealand standards.

It caught my eye because it is almost over the road from the school one of my daughters goes to, and because a fellow parishoner had spent her adult life in the almost identically small next door house.

Not only is the house tiny, but the section is pretty small by any standards.  No great redevelopment opportunities, unless (I suppose) someone managed to buy up the whole row of tiny houses.

Berhampore isn’t such a bad location I suppose.  It is an easy walk to the hospital or to Massey’s Wellington campus.  And I guess one could walk to work in town. The distance from this house to, say, Unity Books in Willis St is about the same as the distance from the Mt Eden shops to the Auckland Unity Books in High St.   But…….Berhampore is not Mt Eden.  It is slowly rejuvenating, and is apparently very popular among Green Party voters, but it will always have small houses, tiny sections, and rather a lot of council/state housing (oh, and the Satan’s Slaves are almost over the back fence).

And yet this tiny property went for $633,500.

Out of curiosity I checked out the real price I paid for my first house in 1989.  It was another couple of kilometres out of town, but the house was bigger, it was a couple of blocks from the beach, and the section was about three times the size of the Berhampore one.  In 2016 dollars, that house cost me $282000.

People in central and local government –  ministers, mayors, councillors, relevant officials – should really be hanging their heads in shame, at having so badly messed up housing and land supply markets to have produced such an atrocious situation.  Sadly, shame now seems like a foreign concept to those who do so much (always well-intentioned, but good intentions are never enough) damage to the prospects, and reasonable expectations, of our younger generations.