NZ houses world's least affordable
5:00AM Monday January 21, 2008
By Anne Gibson
New Zealand has the least affordable houses in the world.
It scores worst in an international survey of the world's six most expensive housing markets, passing Australia for the first time.
Demographia, an international survey business run by Hugh Pavletich of Christchurch and Wendell Cox of the United States, today issued its fourth annual report, showing New Zealand has slipped drastically on an international scale.
The United States, Australia, Britain, Ireland, Canada and New Zealand were studied, and the results reveal NZ house hunters face the biggest gap between earnings and house prices.
Wages are so low and house prices are so high that it takes 18 years and six months of a household's entire annual income to pay for a home, Demographia found. That measure is based on median house prices compared to median wages.
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