A friend bought a house for $1M NZD here in an outer suburb of Auckland in March of 2019. It was a cute house, very old but in decent shape. 2 bed, 1 bath, very small lawn area. Her husband has a $150K+/year job, and she has a ~$90K/year gig, and they barely were able to snag it.
She is moving so had to sell it recently. They did absolutely nothing to the property except keep it clean and do the bare minimum in maintenance (they had 2 kids in those 2 years--absolutely no extra effort was going into house reno!). It just sold for over $1.5M. A little over two years later, and it has gone up in price by 50+%. They are netting over a half a mil just for living there for 2 years!
An anecdote for sure, but a very common kind of story here. Since a lot of lenders require 20 - 40% deposit for a home loan, I will never ever be able to afford a house alone here, not on my $30K/year income. That is all I have to say...
