Home ownership hits 60-year low in New Zealand

Home ownership rates in New Zealand have fallen to a six-decade low, according to data from the 2013 Census released on Tuesday.

The home ownership rate in 2013 was 65.8 percent of private homes, the lowest rate since 1951, when it was 61.5 percent, the government statistics agency said.

Home ownership peaked in 1986 and 1991 at 73.5 percent, said Statistics New Zealand.

The figures were taken from a Statistics New Zealand report on long-term trends of population and dwellings, which also the average number of people in each home had almost halved from 5.2 people in 1886 to 2.7 people in 2013.

The number of dwellings had increased by around seven times in the past hundred years, from 238,066 to more than 1.5 million, while the general population has approximately quadrupled from just over 1 million in 1911 to more than 4 million.

"Households have changed. Our families are smaller, and, partly because of our ageing population, there are more couple-only and one-person households," researcher Rosemary Goodyear said in a statement.

"One of the other marked changes in the past century has been the change in the size of the Maori population, which has increased by over 1,000 percent, from approximately 50,000 in 1911, to nearly 600,000 in 2013. The total population increased by only 300 percent in this same period," Goodyear said. Endi