The 11 three-bedroom homes are on land given by Riverside Park developer Infinity Investment Group as part of the agreement with the Queenstown Lakes District Council to provide affordable housing.
Hayley Cooper and Phil Hammond were offered one of the new houses and said it could not have come at a better time.
"We really like Wanaka but we were planning on moving away because we were sick of moving to different houses. Then we got this phone call to say we had been approved for one of the houses and we were pretty much stoked really, because we had just had a new baby."
Trust executive officer Julie Scott said Riverside Park was a mixed tenure development with households in the Shared Ownership programme, Rent Saver, or the Affordable Rental scheme. A fourth programme called Secure Home will be added later this year, allowing home-seekers to buy a house and take a long-term, affordable lease on the land from the trust.
Ms Cooper said in the past four years she and her partner Phil, who is a mechanic, and Aiden (7) had moved five times and the "huge cost" of buying a house and high rents meant they had been unable to save for a deposit to buy a home. Under the scheme, they would initially rent their new house but part of the rent paid will go towards the deposit to buy the house at a later stage, she said.
Trust executive officer Ms Scott said there was a waiting list of over 500 households throughout the Queenstown Lakes District and 20% of those were in Wanaka.
The trust is also building two houses in the Northlake development, on land north of Wanaka contributed by the developer, she said.
