Episode 3: Where is it More Expensive? Home Edition
This episode of Where is it More Expensive is home heavy. Since so much of our time and energy is spent on settling into our new house, it is pretty much all I can think about right now. I’ve learned quite a lot about home goods, home maintenance, and home services as we settle in.
Paint - The kids were so excited to pick out colors for their new rooms. We let them choose (within reason) and ended up with a minty green for my daughter and a pale blue for my son. My husband and I chose a calming grey for the master. Because this paint was going to be used in bedrooms, I made sure to get a low-VOC option. The most common paint store around us is Resene, so we toddled into one of their shops to pick up a few buckets of paint. Because New Zealand uses the metric system, paint is available in 500ml, 1L, 2L, 4L, and 10L containers. 4L is just over 1 gallon (1 gallon =3.785L for all the Americans out there. You are welcome). We decided to go with 4L buckets to start, which was ample for each of the rooms. Each 4L bucket of Resene Zylone Sheen Zero, which is billed as, “An attractive low sheen waterborne paint suitable for interior use with no added VOCs” was NZ$137.90 (about US$88.26). Compare that to US prices for a gallon of Pittsburgh Paint Wonder-Pro semigloss which sells for about US$28, and you’ll understand why we left the Resene store a bit shell shocked. We weren’t expecting paint to be 3x the cost of what we were used to.
Later, I compared prices of Valspar, a hardware store brand available at regular hardware mega-stores (Mitre 10 in New Zealand and Loewe’s in the United States.) A 1 gallon can of semi gloss costs US$41.11. A low sheen 4L can costs NZ$101.15 (US$64.74). When you break this down per liter, it is US$16.18/liter in New Zealand and US$10.86/liter in America. This isn’t quite as atrocious as the Resene brand comparison and is probably a better guide of price differences. However, New Zealand is still more expensive.
Advantage: United States
Pest Control - In the US, periodically we would have an invasion of some type of creepy-crawlies. Usually when the weather got cold and rainy. In Auckland, there is a similar problem. Here the house-invading bug seems to be tiny little black ants that you’ll see two of one day, and the next they’ve brought thousands of their friends. In both places, I found reliable pest control companies to come out and take care of the problem. In the US, for a one-off treatment with a 30 day warranty, I paid US$280. In New Zealand, I pay NZ$140 (About US$95) for a treatment with a six month warranty. Even better, there’s no pressure to sign up for a monthly contract in New Zealand.
Advantage: New Zealand
Shower Door Replacement - One of the many small projects we’re tackling in the new house is enclosing an open shower in the master bathroom. I like a hot, steamy shower and the current open-shower concept doesn’t work for me. It definitely paid to shop around for quotes as they varied by a few hundred dollars. Eventually, I settled on Arctic Glass for NZ$1202, about US$770. (The high end was NZ$1545, or US$988.) This included all of the glass, hardware, removing an existing glass panel, and all of the labor to install the new glass. Now I can’t do an exact comparison because I never had this project in Austin, but a quick google search shows that most people in the Austin area paid between US$548 and US$1,308 with the average price at US$906 for a frameless shower door.
Advantage: New Zealand
Laundry machines - We needed to buy a washer and dryer for our house, and this sent me down a laundry rabbit hole that I may never come out of. If you’ve read my post on the differences in Kiwi/American laundry habits, you’ll know that this sort of thing is a real problem in my life. There is always laundry! I ended up splurging and getting a Miele washer and dryer. They were each NZ$3500, or about US$2240 (About US$4500, total.) It has proven impossible to find the exact washer and dryer in the United States, but I found a Miele that is similar for US$2,163.92 with free delivery to my old address. I’m not surprised that the US was less expensive, but what I’m really surprised about is that the delta between the two prices wasn’t greater. If tax is taken out of the equation (which clearly it cannot) the New Zealand washer would be less expensive (US$1904 vs. US$1999).
Advantage: United States
Laundry detergent - Sticking with my laundry obsession. In the US I liked Tide Free & Gentle. I could get a giant bottle of it for US$19.47 that lasted me 96 washes according to the handing packaging. In New Zealand, I found Persil sensitive to be a close equivalent. A box with enough powder detergent for 90 loads costs NZ$20, or about US$12.80. That breaks down to 20¢ a load in the US, but just 14¢ per load in New Zealand. Plus, I like the powder detergent better as it is less messy.
Advantage: New Zealand.
The big elephant in the room for homes, is, of course, the homes themselves. New Zealand has a bad rap for cost and availability in the housing market. I talked a little bit about housing prices in this post. While Auckland houses aren’t necessarily the most expensive in the world, they are often ranked among the least affordable because wages simply don’t match the housing prices. This can make breaking into the housing market difficult if you are relying on a Kiwi-centric income to support an Auckland home purchase. There is a very nerdy, but insightful report on the affordability of New Zealand homes compared to the rest of the world from Demographia.
So is housing more expensive? The answer is a very unhelpful “it depends.” If you’re coming from high-dollar markets like California or New York or high property tax states like Texas, you might be pleasantly surprised. We’re in the middle: the houses are more expensive than they were in Austin on a per-square-foot basis, but the property taxes/rates are so much lower that its a bit of a wash. To give you some perspective, we went from paying about US$3000 a month in property taxes to US$350 a month in rates! I think the stories and hype regarding Auckland housing prices have some basis for truth, but it isn’t as bad as the internet would like you to believe.
