Seniors Housing & Healthcare Trends

NEW YORK: A new government project is investigating how to locate empty ‘ghost homes’, find their owners, and encourage them to bring them back to being occupied.

The Government has allocated $500,000 towards testing initiatives that aim to encourage owners to fill their empty properties.

The initiatives are being run under an initiative called Housing Market Renewal, or HMR, and funding was allocated from the $1.9 million from the Budget 2019 homelessness contingency.

Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spokesman Dennis de Reus said overseas research showed the success of HMR programmes relied upon being able to identify empty homes, their owners, and appropriate occupants.

Ghost homes have made the news recently, but de Reus took aim at recent headlines that suggested there were roughly 40,000 empty homes in Auckland at the time of the 2018 census.

“Of the 39,795 properties in Auckland that were unoccupied on census night, for 22,407 the residents were away and 17,358 were empty.”

“The number of empty homes amounted to 3.2 per cent of total dwellings, compared to 5.2 per cent for the rest of the country.”

He said long-term vacant properties made up only a proportion of unoccupied dwellings, with others being holiday homes and between tenancies.

CoreLogic senior property economist Kelvin Davidson​ previously highlighted data was hard to come by to determine exactly why houses were empty.

One of HMR’s first programmes is the Empty Homes Project.

Te Tūāpapa Kura Kāinga (the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development) has funded community organisation Wise Group to begin a feasibility study on what actions the government could take to fill ghost homes.

The study will focus on five selected dwellings, with the objective being finding ways to bring them back to occupation in collaboration with property owners.

“While the Empty Homes Project will initially focus on Hamilton, the work has implications for all major centres in New Zealand, including Auckland, where the extent of so-called ghost homes is currently being debated in the media,” de Reus said.

De Reus said the concept of a ghost home tax or any other policy review was not being considered as part of the project.

A spokesman for Phil Goff said the Auckland mayor had had discussions with the government and NGO sector on possible options, including the potential for vacant houses to be used for the Housing First programme, or for middle-income workers like teachers, police officers and nurses.

“Work is being done by both parties to investigate this,” the spokesman said.

“The benefit for owners of empty properties is that the owner would get an income from rent while NGOs or Kāinga Ora could carry out management of the properties and provide guarantees of the property being looked after and rent paid.”

Goff’s spokesman confirmed the government was currently funding an independent feasibility study into the issue of empty homes across New Zealand.

“The council looks forward to seeing the results of this work.”

De Reus said the HMR was not about HUD or Wise Group acting as a property manager.

Auckland Council’s manager of financial policy Andrew Duncan said officers had carefully considered an empty homes tax but found it to be outside local governments’ power.

Council chief of strategy Megan Tyler said in applying a targeted rate there must be a link between who the council charges and their benefit from, or demand for, the service it provided.

“We cannot apply a targeted rate purely to incentivise ratepayer behaviour,” she said.

According to Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) the Local Government Act (2002) does not allow councils to impose any empty homes taxes.