The number of new homes being finished in Auckland has climbed for three months in a row, an early sign that the city’s residential building industry may finally be pulling out of a slump that has dragged on for the better part of two years.
Figures compiled from Auckland Council and reported by interest.co.nz show the number of Code Compliance Certificates issued for new dwellings rose from 812 in December to 853 in January, then 1,029 in February and 1,327 in March. A Code Compliance Certificate is issued only once a building is finished and signed off as meeting the building code, which makes it the most reliable measure of how much new housing is actually reaching the market.
That matters because building consents, the figure most often quoted in the headlines, are granted before a single brick is laid and only hint at what might be built in future. Consents have been falling sharply since the 2023 peak, leaving plenty of doubt about how quickly finished homes would follow. Completions are the proof that houses and apartments are genuinely being delivered, and the steady monthly lift suggests the pipeline of work approved during the boom years is now flowing through to keys in hands.
The annual picture is still sobering. In the 12 months to the end of March, 14,205 new dwellings received a Code Compliance Certificate in Auckland, down 13.0 percent on the previous year and down almost a quarter on the 12 months to March 2024. The region remains a long way below its high point in late 2023, when more than 1,900 new homes were being completed every month. Getting back to that level would take a sustained run of growth rather than a single strong quarter.
Even so, the direction of travel has shifted. Completions in February were up 14.5 percent on the same month a year earlier, while March was up 5.7 percent, marking the first back to back annual gains in well over a year. After a long stretch of figures that only ever seemed to fall, two consecutive months of growth is the clearest hint yet that the bottom may be behind the industry.
The lag built into the building process makes the turn more telling. It takes around two years for a home to move from a building consent to a finished dwelling, so most of the houses being signed off now were approved back in 2024, when developer confidence was at a low ebb, finance was hard to come by and many projects were being shelved. The fact that completions are rising despite that weak starting point suggests the worst of the downturn has worked its way through the system.
Getting here has been brutal for the sector. A combination of high interest rates, soaring construction costs, falling house prices and tight lending squeezed developer margins to the point where new projects simply did not stack up. A string of building firms collapsed over the past two years, leaving subcontractors out of pocket and half built sites idle. Construction is one of the country’s largest employers, so the slump rippled well beyond the building sites themselves and into the suppliers, merchants, engineers and trades that depend on a steady flow of work.
The national backdrop tells a similar story of a market searching for a floor. Stats NZ figures show building consents across the country have been sliding from their 2022 peak, although the rate of decline has eased in recent months. The official building consents data remains the most watched forward indicator for where construction activity is heading, and any stabilisation there would reinforce the more encouraging completion numbers now coming out of Auckland.
Plenty of caution is still warranted. Commentary around the figures has flagged that the path of the Official Cash Rate and the level of construction costs will be the key factors deciding whether the recovery holds, and there is already a good deal of unsold stock sitting on the market. A glut of completed but empty homes could dampen the appetite to start new ones, even as the headline completion figures improve. The recovery, in other words, looks real but fragile.
For Aucklanders, the stakes are straightforward. The city has spent years grappling with a shortage of homes that has pushed prices and rents to some of the least affordable levels in the developed world. Every additional home completed eases that pressure a little, and a building industry that is hiring again rather than laying off is good news for the wider economy. Three months of rising completions does not end the housing squeeze, but after two grinding years it is the kind of number the sector has been waiting to see.
Are you seeing signs of life in the building trade where you live, or is it still tough going? Share what you are noticing in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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