Sources & method
Sources, method, and what could not be found
This is the page the rest of the site rests on. Below: every dataset used, its licence, its period, and — the part that matters most — what each one cannot support. Then the list of things that were looked for and do not exist, which is more useful than anything on this site that does.
No figure
Renovation cost per square metre published by any free New Zealand source. The dwelling-alterations consent series carries a count and a declared value and no floor area, so the division cannot be performed. Everything else on this page follows from that.
Source verification, this site · 30 July 2026
The datasets
What each one supports, and what it does not
| Dataset | Source and licence | Period | What it can support | What it cannot support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dwelling alteration consents by local board | Stats NZ — Building consents issued (CC BY 4.0) | May 2026 | Value, count and average per consent for renovation work, by local board, plus 120 monthly points. | Cannot give a cost per square metre — the series carries no floor area. Cannot describe a single job. Declared value is the applicant’s own estimate, excludes land, and is inconsistent on GST. |
| New dwellings consented by statistical area | Stats NZ — New dwellings consented by statistical area 2 (CC BY 4.0) | May 2026 | How much new building is happening in each of the 246 suburbs, by dwelling type, over 12 and 60 months. | Says nothing about alterations. Four suburbs could not be matched to the 2023 statistical areas used in the release and are reported as “not separately reported”, never as zero. |
| New dwellings: value and floor area, Auckland region | Stats NZ — Building consents issued | May 2026 | The only honest $/m² on this site: $3,302/m² for new Auckland houses in May 2026. | It is a NEW-BUILD rate. It is not a renovation rate and must never be presented as one. |
| Construction cost and wage indexes | Stats NZ — Business price indexes (PPI and Capital Goods Price Index); Stats NZ — Consumers price index; Stats NZ — Labour market statistics, Quarterly Employment Survey (CC BY 4.0) | March 2026 quarter / June 2026 quarter | How costs have MOVED — nominal and real, deflated by CPI all groups over the identical window. | An index is a movement, not a level. It cannot be rebased into a dollar price for a job, and this site does not do that. |
| Trade pay bands and live job counts | Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator (CC BY 4.0) | 2026-07-30 | Published hourly pay bands and Auckland job-listing counts for 13 building trades — the basis for any modelled labour component. | These are employee pay rates before tax, not charge-out rates, and not a price for a job. Tahatū photos and video are not licensed and are not used. |
| Unitary Plan base zones | Auckland Council Unitary Plan base zones (CC BY 4.0) | 2026-07-30 | The sampled base-zone mix per suburb, and a derived bucket describing it. | Sampled, not planimetric. Base zones only — no overlays, precincts or controls. Never a determination about a section. |
| Special character and historic heritage overlays | Source: Plans and Places, Auckland Council (Unitary Plan overlays). | 2026-07-30 | Per suburb: whether an overlay applies, how many distinct areas, approximate area share, and scheduled heritage counts. | Derived aggregates only — no polygons, no place names, no schedule identifiers. Area shares are estimated by point sampling, so single digits mean “some”, not exactly that. |
| Median weekly rent and bond counts | MBIE (Tenancy Services) rental bond data | Q1 2026 | Median, quartiles and bond counts per suburb and by bedroom count — the investment side of a renovation. | Bond lodgements under-represent long-standing tenancies. A median is not a valuation, and a rent rise is not a return. |
| Suburb and local board boundaries | Stats NZ Statistical Area 2 (2018) boundaries and local board areas | 2026-07-30 | The geography every other dataset is joined on: 246 suburbs built from statistical areas. | Suburb names are a convention, not a legal boundary. Statistical areas were re-cut between 2018 and 2023, which is why four suburbs lose their new-build match. |
| Weathertightness failure rates and cost | PwC for the Department of Building and Housing, “Weathertightness — Estimating the Cost” | 2009 | The cladding split that explains renovation risk: monolithic 95% against weatherboard 2%, and $11.3 billion nationally. | National estimates for the 1992–2005 build period, not a prediction about one house. All rights reserved — cited, never reproduced. |
| Housing stock condition and cladding mix | BRANZ Study Report SR456, “Assessing the condition of New Zealand housing” | 2020 | National cladding shares and the share of houses with more than one cladding type. | © BRANZ, all rights reserved. Individual figures are cited with attribution; no BRANZ table or prose is reproduced. National, not Auckland-specific. |
Every figure on this site carries its source and date at the point of use, not only here. Where a page shows a range that is not directly published, it is labelled judgement and the reasoning is on the page.
Source verification, this site · 30 July 2026
The most useful part of this page
What could not be found
Every one of these was looked for. None of them exists in a form this site is permitted to publish, and each absence explains a decision made elsewhere on the site.
No free per-trade cost dataset
New Zealand publishes no free, official figure for what it costs to paint or renovate a house. Stats NZ publishes the declared value of building consents, which is the applicant’s own estimate, excludes land, and is inconsistent on GST. It publishes cost indexes, which track movement rather than level. And it publishes construction wages. None of them is a price for a job. The only commercial cost libraries — QV CostBuilder and the former Rawlinsons handbook — are paid, licensed products we are not permitted to republish. So where this site shows a range, it says exactly where the range came from, and where it can only show surrounding market context, it says that too.
No floor area on the alterations series, so no renovation $/m²
In the Auckland regional consent series, new dwellings carry a count, a value and a floor area. Altered dwellings carry a count and a value only — there is no floor-area series for alterations at all. The new-build rate that does exist, $3,302 per square metre for Auckland houses in May 2026, describes building a house on a clear site. It is not a renovation rate, and this site never uses it as one.
The Census records neither dwelling age nor cladding material
Which means there is no per-suburb dataset of how old the houses are or what they are clad in — the two facts that predict renovation risk best. Where this site talks about villas or monolithic cladding it is citing national studies and describing the housing type, never asserting a count for a suburb.
Auckland Council publishes no open building-consent records
Consent volumes for Auckland come through Stats NZ, not from the council. There is no open feed of individual Auckland consents, so nothing on this site is derived from one.
BRANZ material is all rights reserved
BRANZ study reports are not openly licensed. Individual figures are cited with attribution as fair reporting of a published statistic. No BRANZ table, figure or passage is reproduced, and no page here is a re-publication of a BRANZ report. The same applies to the PwC weathertightness costing.
The Auckland Council licence conflict
Auckland Council open data is registered CC BY 4.0 on data.govt.nz. At the same time, The ArcGIS item licenseInfo states: "You are not permitted to copy or republish any substantial amount of the information from this website without the prior written consent of Auckland Council." Those two statements cannot both be satisfied by republishing the layers, so the conservative reading is applied: this site publishes only derived aggregates — booleans, counts and percentages. No polygon geometry, no place names, no schedule identifiers, no attribute records.
Trade association member directories
Master Painters NZ, Registered Master Builders and NZ Certified Builders all publish member directories. They are all-rights-reserved compilations of contactable people, so they are linked to and never reproduced here.
The questions this page exists to answer
Why can this site not compute a renovation cost per square metre?
Because the floor area does not exist in the data. Stats NZ publishes, for Auckland dwellings, a count, a declared value and a floor area for new work — and a count and a declared value for altered work, with no floor-area series at all. There is nothing to divide by. That is not a gap this site is unwilling to fill; it is a gap that cannot be filled from free New Zealand sources.
Why not just use the new-build rate for renovations?
Because they are different products. $3,302 per square metre buys a new house built on a clear site in one sequence. Altering an existing house means demolition, propping, matching into old framing and finishes, working around services that were installed to an older standard, and discovering things nobody could price. Relabelling one as the other is the most common false number in the trade.
Why does the site not publish Auckland Council maps or member directories?
Licences. Auckland Council open data is registered CC BY 4.0 on data.govt.nz, while the ArcGIS item itself states that no substantial amount may be copied or republished without written consent. Those two statements conflict, so the conservative reading is applied and only derived aggregates are published. The trade associations’ member directories are all-rights-reserved compilations of contactable people, so they are linked to and never republished.
Where the data is used
The pages these datasets build
What it costs
Consent declared values, the index picture, and the figure that cannot be computed.
All 246 suburbs
Zoning, overlays, new-build activity and rent, joined per suburb and per local board.
Guides
Four guides where every factual claim carries its release and date.
About
Who publishes the site and how it earns, stated plainly.