Welcome to That Home Loan Hub, your ultimate guide to mastering the world of home loans and property. I'm Zebunisso Alimova, here to simplify the complexities of real estate and provide you with expert insights and the latest trends.
Whether you're a first-time homebuyer, an experienced investor, or simply curious about the property market, this podcast is for you. Join me each week as we unlock the secrets to property success and help you make informed decisions. Let's dive into the world of property together!
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11:32
Stats can be dull until they start answering the questions you actually care about: where are homes selling, what are people paying, and which parts of the Kapiti Coast are holding their value best? We sit down with Megan Love to unpack recent local numbers across Waikanae, Paraparaumu and Raumati, focusing on sales volumes, average sale prices, and what it really means when a place sells above (or below) RV. The standout story is how different each pocket can be, from Waikanae Beach’s high-value, lower-volume pattern to the more steady, central results nearby.
We then move from “what sold” to “what should I do next?”, especially for first home buyers and would-be investors. We talk candidly about rental demand in Kapiti, the current feel of weekly rents, and why a long-term tenant who looks after a property can be worth more than chasing rapid rent growth. If you’re weighing up buying versus renting, we also challenge the 20% deposit myth and explain the stepping-ladder approach: get into a first home you can afford, build equity over time, and keep your options open as life changes.
There’s also a crucial compliance insight for landlords and anyone scanning listings: you can’t market a property as a “good investment” without a Healthy Homes certificate. That one detail puts warmth, ventilation and insulation right back at the centre of smart property decisions, not just price and yield.
If you’re tracking Kapiti Coast house prices, comparing Waikanae vs Paraparaumu, or trying to time your first move onto the property ladder, this chat will help you make sense of the market without the hype. Subscribe for more local conversations, share this with a friend house-hunting in Wellington or Kapiti, and leave a review with the suburb you want us to cover next.
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Stats, stats, stats. If you just like us, excited about the stats. Megan is not. Megan Love is in the house and she's brought some stats for us for the last months and she's not too excited to talk about it, but we're gonna force her. Hello, Megan.
SPEAKER_00
Hello. It's not that the stats are bad. It's just I find them very boring. I find houses and people more interesting. Well, thank God for that.
SPEAKER_01
You're in the right line of job.
SPEAKER_00
I am, I am. But I know your listeners like to hear about stats, so we do it, we do it, don't we? We we read them, we read them out.
Okay, so I thought just to make this more fun, we'd start in Waikanai this time. So if you're healing hearing any paper rustling, it's because I've printed them off this time. So let's start in Waikanai. In Waikinae for July, there were 12 sales. Waikinae Beach, there were five. That's more than last month's. Yeah, but it's it's interesting that the Waikanae Beach trend of less sales and Waikinae Central with more sales is continuing. So the average sale price in Waikinae was 680,000, and the average sale price in Waikinae Beach was 910. So although Waikinae Beach has less sales, they are higher value.
SPEAKER_01
Again, I'm sure it was the same last month as well.
SPEAKER_00
It was, yeah. Why the average sale above RV in Waikinae Beach was 10%, which is amazing because we haven't had that for a couple of years. But Waikinae Central, 1%, which is more on trend with what we're seeing across the rest of Carpent. Hey, this is still more than Wellington. Oh, yes. Let's not talk about Lower Heart or Wellington City.
SPEAKER_01
I think they're down like 30% or something.
SPEAKER_00
I don't know. I don't follow their stats because I, as you know, I don't find stats particularly interesting. But um I do feel very, very sorry for them. And yeah, we get a lot of buyers from the city that say, oh, everything's selling under RV. I'm like, welcome to Carpeti. It is not. It is not. It is not. So awesome.
SPEAKER_01
And then from Waikanae and Waikana Beach, we travel down to Pada Pada
So oh gosh, I think I just laughed straight into your microphone there. But so the beach, we had more sales. We had 20 sales with an average sale price of 935. So that's 935,000, 2% above RV. So quite interesting there. So 20 sales at Papan Beach. Then for the central sales, we had 13. So that is again similar to last month. That sort of area is performing better than other areas of company in terms of volume. So Pada Pada Omo Central, we've got 13 sales for July, average sale price of 700,000, which is quite interesting. There's a lot of first home buyers and downsizes in that mix. And again, 10% above RV, which is amazing. Yeah, very cool. Then
we travel down to Raumati. Yes. So we've got Raumati. Romati. I think so. Am I saying it wrong? Okay. South and Beach. So South, and these are quite similar. So South had four sales for July, two percent above RV, and the average sale price was six hundred and ninety-two thousand five hundred. Yeah. Again, very good number for the first-time buyers. Exactly. And you know, not there's probably still some downsizes in that mix, but a lot of first homes because of all this all the awesome schools. And then Beach was nine sales and one percent above RV, and the average sale price was six hundred and eighty-three thousand five hundred as well. So that's sort of ten grand or so less than South.
Is it still a good place to invest? Do you reckon? Like if investors were looking to buy somewhere, would they buy in Carpeti? I think so. I think I'd I'd buy anywhere in Carpety. Because the rental demand is quite strong, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, I we were just talking about that before. So the average weekly rent in Carpety at the moment is $630 per week. So it's not racing away. It's dropped from a few years ago. But what our rental team is talking about, we've got like a Harcourts rental team. It's not part of my job, but we hear from them. They're getting good quality tenants that are staying in properties for quite a long time. So that might be worth it if you're getting $630 a week, but you're getting a good tenant who looks after the house and stays long term.
SPEAKER_01
Because lots of families around here, lots of migrants, funny enough. Like my kids go to Kapakapanui school, and we've had an influx of various families arriving from various countries. So that's really cool to see in like you know, Philippines, South South Africa, and I think even some India and Pakistan, maybe. Yeah, so it's it's I think we're becoming quite international here as well.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that well, that doesn't surprise me. The other thing that I'm seeing in my job is people looking to get into their first homes and they've been renting and they're single parents. So they might have owned a home before somewhere else. They've separated, they've been renting for a while, and now they're trying to get back onto the property ladder. So if you're thinking $630 per week as a rent, if you're paying that on mortgage, I mean, how much of a house would that get you? We could probably run the sums on that at some point. But I mean, that's that's a chunk of coin, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and the other thing that sort of proves the point I usually explain to my first-time buyers that you could be saving and saving and saving. And you know, sometimes there's a myth that you've got to save up to 20% before you buy a house. But often we can get you in less even five percent. And the point is, if even if you just get a now, it's still better than saving. By the time you save that extra 5%, the property prices have shifted up again.
SPEAKER_00
That's what they're predicting. There's like lots of people that are financial forecasters, yeah. And they think that we're sort of like they keep saying now is the time to buy. And you know, if you hear a real estate agent say that, you go, yeah, yeah. But like a lot of people are saying now is the time to buy because properties, it's like the market is sort of stable-ish, it's not racing away. Like, there's still some really good bargains to be picked up in Carpery. Like, we had one advertised at 495 last month, you know. That's cheap. Yeah. When did you see prices? It needs work, but you know, like when can you buy a house like that normally? No in the last five years, you wouldn't have. So there's still things out there that are quite affordable. We've just sold one ourselves, George and I, that was in the 500s.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Um, so you know, like for a young couple starting out with a double income, no kids, that's suddenly looking very achievable.
SPEAKER_01
And it's a good stepping ladder as well. Like I often remind my clients that your first home is not your forever home, it's just a stepping ladder. Get in, get in the market, and then from there you could assess do I even like this area? Do I want to be in here? Do I want to be raising my family here? But at least whatever money you're paying, it's not dead money, it's not rent money that goes away and you never see it again. Yeah, at least whatever you're paying towards your mortgage, even if it's minimal, yeah. And I know in the beginning it's very minimal. A lot of people get frustrated because the principal ratio versus interest ratio is quite low. But at the same time, at least it's going towards your capital. And over time, as the property goes up in value, hopefully you get more capital in it. And then you can always leave that one as a rental. And that's what I did. You know, it was our first home. We left it as a rental, and I still have it. My beautiful tenant has been there for 11 years now, and you know, it's still ticking away. But that property allowed me to get onto the ladder for all the other ones that followed.
SPEAKER_00
I like what you're saying about the dream home concept because I feel like that's something maybe our parents used to have in their minds, like when they were buying back in the day. Oh, we'll buy our dream home or we'll live here forever, and we'll, you know, our kids will grow up with the neighbour's kids. Like that's not really a thing for Wellington. George's mum's from Scotland and they're in a very small town, and they still have that dream home concept over there. But I think for Wellington, like you said, we've got a lot of migrants, we've got a lot of job changes, we've got government workers, we've got people on the move all the time. And you buy your first home and then you upsize, and then you downsize, and then you move into a village or something like that. I feel like there's ages and stages rather than the dream
home now. And then the other thing is like going back to your investment question, did you know we're not allowed to advertise a house as a good investment unless it's got a healthy home certificate? Wow, this is cool. Yeah, yeah. So if you see a hard courts listing that says good investment, it will have a healthy home certificate. Otherwise, we can't say it's a good investment, like if it doesn't have a rangehood or if it hasn't got insulation that meets the standard. Yeah, so it's quite interesting. So there's a lot of people renting here, there's a lot of people buying here, but then there's a lot of people selling here.
No, I always felt like Carpeti was a bit more robust and a stronger, stronger market to buy in. So when even when we were looking to buy, I think we moved in what, 11 years ago. I always go by the age of my second child because that's when we moved away from Palme. He was only two weeks old. And we moved into Paraparumu, and I bought a house off Treatmate, didn't even look at it.
SPEAKER_00
Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_01
And it's right um down by the Parapurumu College. And yeah, it was when we looked in Waikanae, even then, Waikanae was more expensive than Paraparumu. So we ended up going to Paraparumu first, and I didn't really like that house. Because you know, don't buy things off trade me without looking.
SPEAKER_00
It's good to see it, it's good to smell it.
SPEAKER_01
And after living in it for a bit, I always wanted to build, but I guess I was pregnant at the time, and you know, moving CTs, it was just not really a good idea to build at that time. But after living in that house for a bit, I found a section in Waikanae that we wanted to build. And my dream was always to move to Waikanae because Waikanae always felt a little bit. I don't know, there's something different about Waikanae.
SPEAKER_00
There's a lot more trees.
SPEAKER_01
It's a yeah, it's calmer, it's quieter. I don't know, it's just yeah, much calmer than Parapurumu. So for me, I wanted to go to Waikanae, and I knew that at that time I couldn't afford because the prices were 50k higher.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, quite consistently. Like we get city buys, and when we say, Where are you looking? They're like, we might even go as far as Waikanae. I look at their hopeful little faces, and I'm like, Do you know that the prices are actually higher in Waikanae? And they're so shocked. It's like, really? But it's Waikanai, yeah. You know, go check it out. There's a reason why the prices are higher.
