The NZ renting experience can best be described as punitive, and for foreigners coming here can be quite a shock at what it entails (no pets [0], no hanging pictures, short-notice no-fault eviction, good luck getting plumbing and electric fixed, etc. etc.). But relevant to this discussion is the extremely poor state of the housing stock. It is woeful beyond belief.

The house I rent is in a town with median household (i.e. avg of 1.5 earners) income of US$44,000, and my rent is US$1,100/month. One of the inclusions in that cost is what I call the "mould room", which is not just uninhabitable but I don't dare even enter it without a mask [1]. I run a dehumidifier in my kids room for 14hrs/day or they would cough all night in bed - it sucks about 4L moisture per day. But I put up with that because my landlord hasn't put up rent too much (is about 15% behind market at the moment) and the alternatives that come on the market are scarcely any better.

Lest you think I'm being dramatic or that my situation isn't generalisable, I suggest you read this recent reddit thread of NZ renters detailing how cold their houses are [2]. Particularly funny are comments from Norwegian, Swedish, Canadian migrants saying they've never felt as cold in their life as in a New Zealand bedroom.

The only way out of this situation is to buy your own house. That's it. There is no incentive whatsoever for landlords to improve their capital once someone is paying off their mortgage, and covid slowdown notwithstanding, that is guaranteed to be the case due to extreme supply shortage.

Perhaps you were confused by my use of the phrase "capital into real estate" - that doesn't mean building more and certainly never means improving existing stock - it just means buying the same existing houses for more and more money each year. The effect of this, of course, is that people renting these houses have to save more each year for a deposit if they ever hope to own. In this town, in the last 12 months, if you saved anything less than US$12,000 towards your deposit you are now further away from owning a bottom quartile house than last August. It is now estimated that for those born after 1990 (everyone < 30 yrs old) ~60% will never own, because their disposable income will never cover a deposit. So those people will be putting up with cold, expensive, diseased housing for life.

OneRoof, being a real estate advertising company, makes its money on listings priced based on the value of property, and so want to see both higher prices and/or higher turnover. Against typical microecon thinking, these factors are correlated in NZ, so in short all they want to see is higher prices. In other words they make more money the harder it is for renters to escape the cold, and thus put out an endless stream of PR guff about rags-to-riches stories of people flipping houses, hoping (and often succeeding) that 'serious' news outlets like the NZ Herald run the stories uncritically.

That is why "cats are warm lol" is so offensive coming from them.

[0] Adding further insult in the context of this article

[1] If you're wondering why I haven't put in a solution for this - it's a hilly town and this room is embedded in the Earth up to about half way, a not uncommon feature around here. Since it wasn't waterproofed properly, it's about as moist as a rainforest in there, and the only fix would be knocking two walls down and rebuilding that whole section of house.

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/i9h2r1/i_just_w...