Queenstown's average weekly rent has hit a record, with the resort now the most expensive place to rent in New Zealand, new figures show.
For people on the minimum wage of $16.50, rent is now higher than their entire take-home 40 hour weekly home pay. It comes as the waitlist for housing help in the resort town skyrockets, prompting the head of the area's housing trust to warn the situation may get worse.
Queenstown Lakes' average weekly rent hit $616 a week for the September quarter, according to figures compiled by business website interest.co.nz- the only place in New Zealand to break the $600 mark.
That was more than the entire take-home pay for someone earning a minimum wage of about $564.
According to the Otago Daily Times Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust executive officer Julie Scott says the figures didn't come as a surprise.
"That's reflecting what we're seeing on the ground," Ms Scott said.
The average rent for the September quarter rose 6.3 per cent from the same quarter last year. The figure was up 15.4 per cent on the same time two years ago.
''We obviously had this goal of getting 1000 households into affordable housing in the next 10 years.
''We're starting to question whether that's actually going to be enough, given the scale of the problem and the phenomenal increase,''Ms Scott said.
Currently 562 households are on the trust's waitlist needing some form of housing help, she said - eighty per cent from Queenstown and 20 per cent from Wanaka.
The waiting list was 483, a 16 per cent increase from last November.
Queenstown Lakes District councillor John MacDonald, who also chaired the Mayoral Housing Affordability Taskforce, believed a decent amount of affordable housing stock was still between two and three years away.
''The game-changer we need to really make an impact in the meantime isn't available to us. It's a vicious cycle.''
The "harsh reality" he said, was that there was no immediate fix to the district's housing woes.
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