Excluding housing, investment in schools, universities, and hospitals helped lift the overall value of planned building work by $1billion during the past year, including that for the University of Otago, Statistics New Zealand said yesterday.
Consents for all buildings were valued at $1.6billion for July, $1billion for residential buildings and $614million for non-residential buildings.
SNZ’s business indicators senior manager Neil Kelly said, for the 12 months to July, $6.3billion of non-residential building work was granted consent, compared with $5.3billion in July last year.
"Education buildings accounted for half of this increase, with health buildings contributing one-quarter," he said.
Canterbury, Otago, and Wellington were the other main drivers of this year’s increase, he said.
"Over the past year, some of the main sites for building consent issuance have been Christchurch Hospital, the University of Canterbury, the University of Otago, and Victoria University," Mr Kelly said.
Westpac industry economist David Norman said the 10.5% decline in new dwelling consents was not a big surprise.
"We had forecast that consents would decline by 7% after a particularly large leap of 16% in June, on the back of a couple of large retirement villages being consented and a flurry of multi-unit consents in Auckland," Mr Norman said in a statement.
Much of the growth in June came not from Canterbury or Auckland, but from other parts of New Zealand, most notably Lower Hutt, where consents rose more than 30%.
"Unsurprisingly then, in July, consents fell sharply in these other regions," Mr Norman said.
Residential consents for the year to July were 29,084, remaining near the highest total in 11 years.
However, in Auckland, total residential consents for the year reached 9622, less than one-third of the national total, despite Auckland accounting for at least half of the country’s population growth during the past year.
"A lot more growth in consents will be needed to begin eating into the housing shortfall of 30,000 dwellings," he said.
ASB economist Daniel Snowden said building consents for July had retreated after June’s strong performance.
"As well as declining 10.5% month-on-month, seasonally adjusted consents slipped back below the three-month moving average for the first time since March," he said in a statement yesterday.
The decline was despite a strong showing from apartments.
The non-adjusted total of 425 apartments marked a high since December, and the second-largest number of the last 12 months.
"However, it is worth highlighting the choppy nature of apartments.
"Stand-alone houses slipped 5.7% month-on-month though, while townhouses were almost unchanged," he said.
