Retardicon 6

Auckland and the inner Hauraki Gulf from space.

Today’s tale forms the first part of an exciting new series by guest authors. If you have a tale you’d like to share with us please leave your submission in The Agora, along with instructions for how you’d like it presented. If you don’t want your name published please say so.

In Part One of Retardicon 6 British migrant ‘Escapee’ tells the unwary reader of the pitfalls of owning property in New Zealand, specifically the most unique of New Zealand’s problems – the leaky home and shockingly poor construction standards, bordering on 3rd world. For more tales in the series click on the Retardicon 6 tab at the top of the page.

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Retardicon 6 (part 1)

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Five years ago my wife and I moved from England to Retardicon 6 (you might know this loathsome place as New Zealand – we know better). We arrived on Christmas Day 2007. We arrived back – blessedly – in the UK on Christmas day 2012. Our story isn’t the tragedy you find in other posts on this site in as much as we were never trapped by this sly, dirty, back-stabbing society of inbreds and they weren’t able to drain every last cent of our capital from us, as is their intention with all immigrants – au contraire, Rodney. We have in fact brought a nice chunk of their capital back home with us. But I can confirm the nightmare that everyone here posts about.

I first moved to Retardicon 6 late in 1990 with my first wife. I have to say that my experience back then was good. I lived in a smart area of Auckland’s North Shore – Campbell’s Bay, with a house overlooking the Hauraki Gulf. I won’t bore you with the usual tales of boating and fun, just say that I enjoyed it while constantly being aware of how isolated it is down there. And if you are one of those people who thinks that the world has shrunk and everywhere is just a plane ride away, I’m going to laugh right in your face. Until you’ve faced the prospect of making long-haul journeys on a regular basis, you have no idea. England to New York or Florida don’t count. Mere bus rides by comparison. Since I have to be in Los Angeles two or three times a year, and England once a year, I can tell you how isolated Retardicon 6 is, and how soul-destroying travelling ANYWHERE from there is (except Sydney or Melbourne, perhaps). If you find yourself in a position where the pennies count (as many who come down here quickly do) you will really feel the psychologically depressing sense of isolation, especially if you have left loved ones behind. If anything were to happen to them, it’s not a simple matter of getting in a car and going round to see them. Not even a quick one-hour Easy Jet hop from Spain or France. By the time you’ve arranged a flight – if you can afford it – it’s going to be the best part of a week before you are back, frantic with worry the whole time. By then it might be too late. Good luck if you watch a lot of television and think you can get on a plane the same day. You MIGHT be lucky, if you can stretch to a business-class ticket. Even then, door to door, your travelling time is going to be over 36 hours. Yes it is – time in the air is going to be at LEAST 24 hours, but it’s not just the time in the air. It’s getting to and from airports at each end, having to be there 3 hours in advance of the flight time, a MINIMUM of two hours at each stop on the way. Unless you fly Air New Zealand (via Los Angeles) you’ll have more than one stop, and each of those stops will definitely be more than two hours. Add it up for yourself. And imagine going through it when you are frantic with worry.

Back to the narrative though. My first wife and I split up, and I met and married my current wife, a Kiwi girl, in 1996. A few months later, we emigrated back from there to England. She was desperate to leave and I could never quite work out why. We had eleven mostly lovely years in England, but in 2004 we sensed that England was living in an economic bubble and that while Retardicon’s economy was backward by comparison, it was relatively stable. In particular, Auckland’s property market was inflating steadily, driven by demand. So we decided to park some of our capital there. I went back to Retardicon early in 2005 and bought four houses in Auckland, which we put into the hands of a property management agent, attached to one of the major real estate agents. This is where we should have started to smell a rat about this vile little country. Several times, after I got back to England, I had the management company call me telling me of problems with one or other of these properties that needed attending to. And the prices quoted for fixing these issues seemed exhorbitant to say the least. The final straw came when an estimate for fixing what was a simple issue came in at $6,700. Luckily, we had my wife’s father to call on and he went to look at it, got a builder he knew to go with him, and the actual price for the fix came in at $650. YES, a tenth of the gouging criminally inflated quote from the management agent and what was obviously a crony builder of hers. I wonder how much inflated profit they have shared over the years…

In 2007, in a fit of madness, I persuaded my reluctant Kiwi wife that we should leave England and go back to Retardicon 6, to have a couple of years there, then realise our assets. If only she’d hit me over the head with a hammer and brought me back to my senses. But she didn’t, God bless her. And as I say, we arrived in Retardicon 6 on Christmas Day, 2007.

Our intention was to cash in on the profit we’d made on the houses I’d bought, taking our time to do it, and enjoying our time there in the meantime. It didn’t work out like that though. Not a bit of it. The first months were spent sorting out various problems with our properties that the management agents (lazy and arrogant beyond belief – traits we were going to discover to be the norm among Kiwis) hadn’t addressed or even ever told us about. We just got everything ready to start putting them up for sale in late 2008 when the credit crisis hit. Disappointing, but we’d sit tight and sell once things had righted themselves. Auckland, to be fair, didn’t dip as much as most of the rest of the world. But we know better than to sell in a buyers market – which is what it had become. And thus began five years of misery.

We decided to stay until things started to look up financially, and look after our properties ourselves. Our first contact with the disgusting, sly, cunning kiwi way came when we wanted work doing on some of our properties. NOT ONE SINGLE CONTRACTOR would give us a final price for doing the job. They’d all tell you what needed doing (and this differed – sometimes wildly – from contractor to contractor) but even when pressed, none of them would give us a price. This is astonishing, coming from England where we are used to contractors assessing the job and quoting you on how much it would cost to do. What the gouging, sly, cunning kiwis did was tell us that they wouldn’t know the final cost until the job was underway and they could assess how much time/materials were going to be involved. We soon discovered the kiwi that this is the kiwi way. No job has a uniform price – the lousy and often unqualified (at anything) kiwi “builder” is sizing up how much he reckons he can rake out of you. I put builder in quotes just then because the very best kiwi builder is less skilled than a toddler with a box of Leggo. And this country has the brass neck NOT to recognise building qualifications from other countries. There is one reason for this, and one reason only; they are frightened to death of immigrants coming in and showing them up. No joke, this is true.

Not long after we arrived, we learned of Leaky Home Syndrome. Apparantly, almost all the homes built by these “chimps with hammers” (otherwise known as New Zealand Master Builders) in the 1990s and early 2000s suffer from this. And no, no need to scratch your head wondering what this is; it’s exactly as it sounds. These houses LEAK and because they are all built using wooden frames, they ROT FROM THE INSIDE!!! Can you believe that? Kiwi houses ship water (and boy, does it rain in that God-forsaken hole) by the bucket. Cost of repair is often the same as building a new house!

The houses affected for the most part were those built with some form of cladding over the timber frame. We owned one such house, but luckily ours wasn’t officially a Leaky Home. Which is not to say it didn’t suffer from leaks here and there. You have to understand that the odd dribble of water coming into your house now and again is considered normal in Retardicon 6. I have heard New Zealand houses described as “Wooden Framed Tents.” This is true. They are utterly unsanitary to live in. Cold and damp beyond belief. I have never, ever ever anywhere else in the world encountered mold growing on the walls and ceilings of a LIVING ROOM (not just the bathroom) but this is common in the houses of Retardicon 6. Not just the odd spore either. Whole patches of black mold appearing. The damp is all-pervasive. No wonder kiwi inbreds have a higher incidence of respiratory complaints than anywhere I have ever been.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that Auckland winter temperatures seem mild; the pervasive damp WILL KILL YOU. 12 degrees C in the insanitary Auckland damp will chill you to your bones. We’ve just enjoyed a couple of weeks of lovely snow and ice here in England, with sub-zero temperatures. But it was dry, and outside with my dogs it didn’t feel anything like as cold as being indoors during an Auckland winter does. Of course, those of you who’ve set your hearts on emigrating to Retardicon 6 will discount this. You won’t believe it. Right up until that first damp cold day you encounter. By which time it will be too late for you and your family as you huddle around the calor gas, fume-emitting heater. No such thing as central heating in Retardicon 6. There is a plethora of heat pumps that the gouging thieves will fit for you at an inflated price, but at best they’ll only take the chill out of the re-circulated air. They won’t heat your home.

When we came to sell the one house we had that was constructed in using cladding, we got to see just what kiwi building construction consists of. We had to have a piece of interior plasterboard removed from inside the integral garage so that some of the rotting timber frame could be replaced. I also got to see that the house, like all kiwi rubbish homes hadn’t been built on a foundation worthy of the name! The house consisted of a timber frame with plasterboard sheets pinned to the inside of the frame, forming the interior wall, and some sort of cladding just a couple of millimetres thick pinned to the exterior. No insulation in between. NOW can you see why these houses are all horribly damp and cold? Even the much-vaunted “kiwi weatherboard” house is no better. Timber frame with plasterboard on the inside, and very thin (often Cedar) overlapping planks (weatherboards) on the outside. Following the Leaky Home debacle, this traditional weatherboard home was held in great store. But they are just as cold and damp as the newer builds. I’ve owned both types so I do know this. For the record, weatherboard homes don’t have to be built in such a shoddy “she’ll be right” cheap, unfit for purpose fashion. You’ll see weatherboard houses all over the United States and Australia, and these homes are different animals altogether. Sealed, warm, dry, cosy, insulated. It’s not that it can’t be done; it’s just that lazy, arrogant, cheap, grasping, unskilled kiwis can’t do it.
This is the end of part one of what will be a short series. In subsequent episodes, if the editor of this blog allows it, I’ll cover topics such as the inbred hypocrisy of kiwis, kiwi cowardice, kiwis and driving, kiwi arrogance, kiwi intellectual stupidity, kiwi racism – and more.

For God’s sake, think think and think again before ever committing to taking your family to this hell on earth, especially if you can’t afford to come back.

*** WARNING***
DON’T MAKE THE MISTAKE OF THINKING THAT NEW ZEALAND IS JUST THE SAME AS AUSTRALIA – IT’S FAR FROM IT!!!

If you can get into Australia – go there! It’s a wonderful country by comparison with Retardicon 6, and I can say that from experience. If you can’t get into Australia but can get into New Zealand, don’t kid yourself that New Zealand will be just as good. It won’t. And you will be consigning your family to a living hell.

Retardicon 6 (part 2)

I’ve been back in England for more than 15 months now and still feel like every day’s a holiday having escaped from the hell hole. Please encourage EVERYONE to call the lying mendacious ugly cheating grasping cess-pit “Retardicon 6.” It will be appropriate for it to have this new name to go with its new flag. God knows it’s earned the name. I am a seasoned world traveller and have lived in several countries. But I have still never experienced the lack of integrity, morality, decency, education, culture and intellect that I found to be the absolute norm in Retardicon 6. Loathsome country. Loathsome people.

Oh, and for the record you Retardicons out there – you don’t OWN Lord of the Rings OR the Hobbit. I have to mention that because the MAJORITY of cretins I came across down there (that’s nearly everyone) seemed to think that they were originally set in Retardicon 6 and that was why they were filmed there. I kid you not, hard though it is to believe. So, Retardicons, let me give you the skinny-low, as we say in Hollywood… The Hobbit AND Lord of the Rings are QUINTESSENTIALLY ENGLISH. Not even British. ENGLISH. Get that? No one could have been more English than the Oxford Don, JRR Tolkien (he wrote them, by the way, just in case you’re wondering who I’m talking about, you illiterate scabs). And “the Shire” isn’t some crappy region of cattle meadows made toxic by the unrestricted use of chemicals on the land, allowed to slurry into the water systems because of the morons of Retardicon 6 – it’s actually based on Staffordshire and other of the shire counties bordering Birmingham. These are all in England, which I mention because I know that geography isn’t a strong point with you either. I could make other correspondences for you, but even morons like you should get the picture by now… although,,,, no, never mind.

Anyway, I understand that winter is approaching for you all down there. Be sure to stock up on the chemicals you’ll need to remove the mould from the walls and ceilings of the shacks and wooden-framed tents that you call houses down there. I go camping here and my European tent has far greater weather-proof properties than your homes. At least it doesn’t leak – which is more than can be said for the rubbish put up by your chimps with hammers – whoops sorry, you call them New Zealand Master Builders…

Anyway, can’t stop. Have exciting things to do. Cultural things. I’d tell you about them but it would all go right over your cretinous illiterate heads.

Toodle-pip!

25 thoughts on “Retardicon 6”

  1. As shite as NZ (and it is the fucking shite of shites) is it is all the more shite for having so many POMs living there. What is it about wet countries and droll, dishonest muppets.

  2. Retardicon 6 made me laugh, it’s so perfect a name. So been here near on 6 years and sadly I’m one of the few with the entrepreneur gene, can’t seem to lose it, but NZ has done a good job trying.

    Building, yep fletchers have it sewn up with ridiculous low quality materials at exhorbetant prices – when you question this it’s met with ” it’s below cost price ” NO it isn’t it’s below the minimum 500% markup your boss, the greedy middleman requires. Seriously NZ businesses expect to make their staff wages on one sale on a Monday morning…very healthy for the owner, drives the bulk of the population into poverty, and because they are so misguidedly daft and gullible, they accept it, cos that’s how it’s always been…wake up guys it’s a rip off.

    For anyone, like me that tries to buck the trend and import anything and everything, you will be hounded by maf, customs, ird, the port, not to mention daft fees for just about anything you haven’t thought of… Question this as you do, will meet a brick wall and you soon discover they all behave the same, even to other kiwis, it’s called stealth taxes and protectionism, it’s alive and flourishing and explains why everything is so dear.

    Don’t try and introduce new products, oh no, as these are met with ” that’ll never work here, not suitable for NZ conditions” which is codeword for we still use old rubbish to do our work and are frightened, sorry, too stupid to see there is a better way, machine, material etc.
    I saw an earlier comment that NZ buys low cost goods, so true, NZ likes old shit, the more worn out and crap the better. Anything half decent at perhaps 20-30% more will be passed over on the way to the shit pile, that will be scavengered. No one factors in time spent fixing stuff here as a cost. If you were to spend 300 hours working at a paltry $25 an hour, you would have $6000 more after tax, but no, they’d sooner spend 300 hours fixing a knackered item that will still be worth fanny Adams and claim how clever they are…

    Distressed sales- oh yes a kiwi loves to take immense pride in how they have paid nothing for an item, property etc when it sold for 10 times that a year ago, taking real pleasure out of someone else’s misery, in fact it’s a national pastime, for me it only makes dirty business, resentment and bad feelings. Oh and not to forget that if a kiwi buys an item and it’s not absolutely perfect, for 10% of its value how things change, the nice attitude is replaced with venom and abuse, how dare you I trusted you, don’t try and reason that the price reflected such, oh no, for goodness sake there is no common sense in this place.

    It’s laughable that kiwis believe the media ads that mr Michelin the global tyre producer makes tyres specifically for NZ roads, did you know the roads in NZ are unique to the rest of the world….we have hills here, really, have you ever travelled outside your homeland, perhaps with your brothers sister…that’s why they are so expensive….and the guy who imports them lives in the big flash house on the hill overlooking the peasants, sailing past them on his catamaran and they lap it up and believe it, stupid and moronic doesn’t even begin to describe such, yet it’s alive and well and blossoming here.

    Scenery and free parking, lack of people and relative safety make NZ a great holiday or retirement place, just don’t try and buy a business, set one up or do anything to become that tall poppy. Go to work for the morons if you must, take the good bits out of being here and you just may start to enjoy some of the good bits, all the best to you expats, at least you have another realistic take on Nz !

    • Yeah and worse thing about what you are saying is that it’s all true. You only have to start selling your stuff on trademe (New Zealand’s answer to E-bay) to see the sort of reaction you get if they buy something from you and isn’t what they thought they were getting. No emails, no civilize conversation in trying sort issue out, no just constant abusive feedback accusing you of being scam artist because they’re too stupid to read what it said on listing or are too dumb to realize that it’s listed there as being on special for a reason. This place really is sad and pathetic … 😥

  3. As a New Zealander…I cannot argue with any of the points the original poster made, He is correct on all accounts, I came from a small town where things progressed a little more slowly than the rest of the country, but when I finally left it, I found everyone in the rest of the country was turning stupid, I spend many years being angry about this, I still am somewhat.

    So I returned to my little town, only to find my street had doughnut tracks all up and down it, and it too had finally come to the point where it was stupid much to my horror.

    gone are the days of Kiwi ingenuity where a small toolbox and some number 8 fencing wire were all a kiwi needed to fix a problem, most kiwis don’t know what brake fluid is, yet still drive, they don’t know how electricity works, or even the most basic of basic parts of a car. To be able to fix something you have to understand it even more so if you are to build something, most here cannot understand the very basics unless its how to text while driving, or post a facebook message.

    I myself was a below average student, I’m not great at maths, or spelling, but I was taught as a small town farm boy used to be, and have grown up able to fix virtually anything, and understand how a thing works simply by looking at it.

    I feel very much the last of my kind, 30 years out of sync for my age.

    • I think people will start to take New Zealand seriously when the inbred Kiwis can actually build houses with central heating and insulation. Moreover, I think Kiwis are on par with Americans in terms of numeracy and literacy skills. The difference is that Americans are much nicer people on average and they have better integrity than do the Retardicons in New Zealand. Likewise, the United States can still attract talent from around the world and reward its own talent. New Zealand is negative natural selection at work to the extent that the top 10-20% of every generation leaves the country producing an even more incompetent and dishonest type of inbred.

      • Perhaps, but international comparisons always deserve close scrutiny. On the whole, the US has declined significantly in the last 20-30 years due to the incessant meddling of politicians (e.g., Rick Perry, et al.), deliberately dumbing down school curricula to appease religious constituents, or micromanaging educators and the education system. Also, young people growing up in America have clearly recognised that those who have prospered and become wealthy in the US weren’t the class valedictorians, rather the drop-outs (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, to name a few famous examples), deal makers (Donald Trump, Warren Buffet), professional athletes, and performers (actors, singers).

        As for New Zealand’s rankings, I am suspicious, and sincerely doubt that its 30-60 year-old cohorts compare favourably to their international counterparts. Transparency International comes to mind ….

        • Having had children in school in both countries, and known migrants in NZ who had previously had children in school where they came from, I can attest that NZ is roughly 2 years behind as far as the level of material it teaches. Moreover, they are permitted to use calculators from an early age and skip learning certain types of operations “because people use calculators for that now” (ex. long division), whereas American children are forced to just “learn how to do the operation”. As a friend of mine noted, “you’re only a genius until your calculator batteries die”.

      • Well I think you have people with low IQ in any population and there are bright people here in NZ and overseas – it is only that the attitude is much more negative here in NZ than in America thanks to tall poppy syndrome and seeing outsiders as a threat. What you see of Americans on television is only what the news SHOWS you and me and 2 other friends (all Americans – very intelligent ones at that) laugh about what they show America to be like and the very teeny slice of reality that NZers see of Americans – they think we are all fat, lazy and rich – and we laugh out loud at that one. The education system in NZ is not even close to the education system in America and I find that doing the same job here bores me to tears. Yes, insulation – I was asked if I was building a lunchbox when I started to insulate my house several years back..but if you don’t — these houses are cold, damp and unbearable.

    • Looking at the price of books in New Zealand I doubt that many people have seen a Tolkein book let alone read one. They do associate very closely with the films though and your country’s national airline and tourism body went for them big time, the government moved heaven earth and employment legislation and handed out millions of dollars to keep the hobbit films in New Zealand. What was the tag line they used? Fantasy is reality. Oh boy they weren’t wrong there! 🙂

      • Despite outrageous levels of pirating in New Zealand, I seriously doubt it’s books for their e-readers they are downloading.

  7. Thanks for this article. The comment about not being able to get a straight quote from a tradesman is spot on. I just thought that was normal growing up there, it’s very odd.

    I was surprised that someone had not heard of leaky house syndrome in NZ but I guess the height of the coverage was a few years ago. This article explains it pretty well: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/4847027/Leaky-homes-A-crisis-with-no-end-in-sight
    It is a massive problem in Auckland and people have taken their own lives because they own a leaky home, cannot sell it obviously, cannot get a payout from the builders because all kinds of slipping sliding evading stuff goes on.
    The primary causes of leaky buildings are changes to building techniques – no eaves, stucco walls etc and the fact that timber no longer had to be tanalised. When I was a kid, all building wood was tanalised and wouldn’t rot if it was out in rain and if you threw a chunk of it in a fire it wouldn’t burn properly.

    Our last rental in NZ was quite beautiful outside and in but no wall insulation and you just can’t get the house warm. It really affects your mood and I genuinely think the poor housing may be a contributing factors to NZ’s overall depressed vibe.
    We now live in Oz and if anyone reading this is considering the two countries, Oz is miles ahead.

  8. The British at the moment seems to be building a fair few houses, I’m in the north of England and there is a lot of housing going up, all I can say is that the houses build here now are solid external (brick) 95% of the time, with drywall internal walls, this is cheaper and less time consuming but doesn’t really effect the price, I will say though that Britain and Europe have some of the best and most advanced building materials available. I’d imagine people like carpets because they are warmer than wood/tile which is the alternative.

    Most UK new build houses come with a 10 year guarantee against any problems.

    The history and skills used to build older building are still available in the UK, those these will be specialists.

    I’m not sure about the US or the majority of Europe, i only travelled to New Zealand because I got sucked into the brand, I got the chance to see what it was like for myself and I just didn’t take to the place or the people. I can’t believe I found this website because it described everything I felt, friends of mine who have never been thought I was mad because I didn’t jump at the opportunity (I got offered 4/5 jobs while out there)

    NZ housing, maybe it will get better with time but the housing I saw which was 90’s built was poor, certainly not worth the $400,000 price tag.

    • Thanks for sharing your insights. Having spent a few months living in a quaint town in Lancashire, I can say that the UK is a far lovelier place to live. You can take strolls in old parks where the retaining walls are made of solid stone juxtaposed against the lovely green background of England. Contrast this with the shoddy lack of maintenance in New Zealand.

      The English houses have central heating, insulation, and they are much warmer than the garbage from New Zealand. In fact, I can assure you that the local government in Switzerland world condemn and order the demolition of Kiwi houses.

      Anyway, thanks again.

    • housing in the u.s. varies quite a bit from one area to the next and even within a single area. this is partly because in many areas you will have housing / apartments side by side built during several different decades. my neighborhood here in L.A., for example has structures built from 1908 clear through to last year. for the most part, though, building codes in the states are pretty solid and well enforced by authorities and not much is at the level of what i’ve heard about NZ. however, planned obsolescenece is alive and well and even in my area many cool old 1905-1930 era houses (mostly ‘graftsman’ style around here) have been torn down and replaced with ugly futuristic or neo mediterranean florida looking structures (many being condominiums, yuck!!!!) so yeah some structures are not really built to last indefinitely especially because the population is always growing so some are built with the idea that they’ll be torn down and replaced at some point. i’m only talking about L.A. and much of cali. here, which as we all know is not very old.

      still, though, i’ve never been to NZ but the quality of construction people are talking about on this site does sound distinctly 3rd. world (i lived in mexico for 14 months). alot of it too, though, is that structures need to be MAINTAINED which we all know throughout the world does not always occur as often or as properly as it should.

  9. I visited NZ 2013 and spent 2 months there, I own a small construction business in the UK and was looking at potentially moving there.

    I have never heard of the term “leaky home” until I came across this site.

    NZ house at first glance seem to give the same impression that the whole country does, looks lovely from a distance, until you look closer.

    Houses in NZ, particularly where I was staying $400,000 ndz + looked fantastic from the street, all differing styles, modern looking, unique, detached. From the street they look the business.

    The house I stayed in looked like it was built in the 60,70’s, it was actually built in 1997

    What would put me off from owning a home in NZ would be the quality upon closer inspection, most houses have single glazing, very thin aluminium frames, built with timber, cladding or some sort crappy of plastic exteriors, my problem with timber/wood is that it moves, expands, shrinks, rots and eventually detiriates and crumbles.

    Couple that with insulation issues, condensation occurring due to hot air and cold air meeting, water and wood don’t mix,

    Some houses in NZ look the part from the street, but when you actually have a good look around and get the feel they do feel very cheap and tacky, very thin and not very homely. The best way I would describe the feeling is like staying in a static caravan (Google it) in the UK, you don’t ever get the feeling your 100% inside,

    The attitude from the locals when you quiz them about the building trade was they didn’t know or care about that, because they had a garage door that was electrical “your house looks like it was build by a 12 year old” “yeah na, av you seen mi elictric garage door”.

    Don’t get me wrong UK houses are far from perfect and a fair few are an eyesore, but the difference being is houses in Britain will, and have lasted the test of time, they are built with quality materials and quality craftsmanship.

    Anybody considering moving to NZ who owns a property in the UK, don’t sell up and go on a whim, rent your property out for 6/12 months and test the water over there first.

    NZ has a very good trick of looking fantastic from this side of the fence.

    • @UK Builder

      I would like to get your opinion as a professional if you do not mind. I know nothing about building so forgive my ignorance.

      I have never encountered such shoddy construction as what I have seen in New Zealand. It reminds me of the USA construction that looks good initially, but deteriorates rather quickly. However, the New Zealand residential construction is of much poorer quality than even the USA houses in addition to costing three times more to build. The USA quality is not great, but at least the houses are warm in winter and the construction costs are low.

      UK housing seems ok, but I do not like the fact that virtually all the houses I have been in have carpet. Carpet is obviously cheaper, but I think it is not very hygienic. However, the frame, roof, etc seem much better than the crap from New Zealand.

      In Switzerland and even Italy or Spain, the construction seems very solid and having proper floors, whether parquet, wood, marble, etc is standard. I actually very much like the housing in Europe.

      What is your opinion as a builder? One of my worries is that the planned obsolescence and do everything cheap seems to be creeping even in Europe. I doubt contemporary builders could erect what Europeans built centuries ago without modern machinery. It seems like a lost art.

      Anyway, please share your thoughts and thanks in advance.

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