Anne Bate felt “crazy” trying to downsize in the middle of a global pandemic. But selling her home in the paradise of the Pahi fishing village in the north-west of New Zealand’s North Island proved the easy part.
It was in Timaru, her destination some 1,360km away on South Island, that Bate experienced the other side of the market. “It was like the quick and the dead,” she said. Even as a cash buyer she said it was a “miracle” that she managed to find a place and move closer to her grandchildren.
New Zealand has been in the throes of one of the biggest property booms in the world. A relative safe haven, with comparatively low cases of Covid-19, the median house price has surged by 43 per cent over the past two years, according to Sense Partners, an economics consultancy.