It took only four hours to sell 57 prime waterfront sections totalling just over $30 million last week.

Waitakere City's booming population is helping push the area's house prices ahead of others in the Auckland region.

A revaluation that has seen the capital value of South Taranaki properties increase by 34% in the past three years, and could lead to rate increases of more than 40% on some properties, was scrutinised by South Taranaki District councillors yesterday.

Dunedin City Council chief executive Jim Harland says he is very happy with the work his employees have done to try to meet elected representatives' demands for a nil general-rates rise next year.

Rates increased consistently this month. The latest mortgage interest rate survey conducted by Good Returns, showed that the frequency of increases slowed only as lenders held their collective breath for the Reserve Bank's OCR announcement later this week.

Given a knife-edge choice whether or not to raise interest rates to curb a rampant housing market, Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard today chose to play Santa rather than Scrooge.

Commerce Minister Lianne Dalziel today announced that the government will review the Unit Titles Act 1972. “Although this was a recommendation arising out of a 1999 report of the Law Commission, it has been the recent report of the Auckland Regional Council ‘Bodies Corporate and Intensive Housing in Auckland’ that has highlighted the urgency for this work,” Lianne Dalziel said. The ARC report identified a range of problems concerned with the way body corporates are required to operate under the current legislation. In particular, the report found that this was leading to practical difficulties in getting agreement to the on-going maintenance and effective management of these developments.

A 3.6ha section at Gleniti sold for more than quarter of a million dollars on Saturday.

Taranaki's over-heated property market has rents running as much as a third higher than this time last year and state house waiting lists up 60%.

Soaring rents have forced hundreds of Christchurch families on to government housing waiting lists, with little relief in sight for low-income tenants.

People are rushing into residential property because the capital gain is "fantastic", according to Massey University Property Professor Bob Hargreaves – but some may be jumping on an "irrational" bandwagon.

The quarter-acre section has been replaced by the quarter-acre house that critics are calling the McMansion.

Economists are split on whether the Reserve Bank will hike the Official Cash Rate when it publishes its December Monetary Policy Statement on Thursday.

It should have been too good to be true, as Justice Ronald Young pointed out in his doorstop of a judgment.

Q. I am 52 years old. My parents died six years ago and I was the sole beneficiary. I retired and have been living mainly off the revenue ever since.

I own my own home - it is freehold - and I also own two rental homes. One is freehold and the other has a $50,000 mortgage. This costs $348 per month principal and interest over 25 years. I am four years into the term.

Mark Alexander Speech: Nelson Property Investors Association At Ocean View Function Centre, Nelson