The over sixties townhouse market in Christchurch, New Zealand: Investment performance and market acceptance

Abstract

Housing for the elderly is a world-wide challenge made more explicit in countries like New Zealand with an ageing population profile combined with increasingly unaffordable housing. A response to these challenges was a change made to the 1995 Christchurch City Plan designed to encourage the construction of higher density, independent elderly housing units that became known in the market as Over Sixties Townhouses. The research reported on in this paper starts to examine both the investment performance of these housing units relative to the wider housing market in Christchurch as well as the market acceptance of this style of housing by those currently in occupation.