Housing drought hits Raglan

Over the last few weeks, the pool of houses available for rent in Raglan has dried up. Now the websites of both of the main local realtors (Ray White Raglan and LJ Hooker Raglan), show no rentals homes available in town. Locals don’t recall the Raglan rental housing market ever being this tight before. They say it wasn’t even this tight in 2010 when the wind farm construction workers snapped up a lot of homes while the wind farm  was being built. A check of realestate.co.nz and trademe.co.nz shows just a one 3-bedroom home in Te Uku and a 1-bedroom home in Waitetuna available.  It may pay to contact the realtors directly and go on their waiting list, as any rentals that do come available are likely to be snapped up before they get onto a website.

In advance of people moving to Raglan, some have started posting on the Facebook Raglan Noticeboard to see if any homes might be available. The only other option available is expensive short term holiday lets.

In the Raglan house sales market prices are heading up. The latest REINZ report shows median house prices up 5% from Jul-Sep 2013 to Jul-Sep 2014. There are still plenty of homes available for sale with the over 200 listed on real estate web sites.

So it seems anybody moving to Raglan to live in the near future will need to look a buying rather than renting.