REAL ESTATE.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 151, 27 June 1924, Page 10

REAL ESTATE.

LAND AND BUILDINGS. Plans have been prepared for the erection of a new fire station at Devonport, and so soon as the Borough Council , decides upon a site, tenders will be called for the work and the building proceeded '■ with. j 1 The fine new building to be erected at I the corner of the King's wharf and Quay Street for Messrs. R. and W. Hellaby, ! will shortly be started, the tender of Mr. c J. H. Colborno having been accepted. 1 The architects arc Messrs. Chilwell and ' Trevithick, and the building, which will "■ run into many thousands of pounds, f will be the distributing depot, etc. for > Messrs. Hellaby's business. I One of the few big jobs for which I tenders have been called during the last t month or so is the erection of a five- t storey concrete and brick building in , Victoria Street for Mr. James Hodgson. 1 Mr. F. A. Browne is the architect and ' tenders close on Monday next. I * Oood progress is being made with the c work of altering and adding to the late * residence of Mr. Caughey in Murdoch ' Road, Mt. Albert, which is to be the ' Karitane Home. Messrs. Chilwell and t Trovithiek are the architects, and it is I hoped to have the work completed and c the home officially opened in September. ' A four-storey reinforced concrete j building for the' Royal Exchange Assur- | ance Corporation, of London, is to be \ i erected in O'Connell Street and tenders ; are now being called for the work. < Messrs. Arnold and Abbott are prepar- ] ■ng plans for a two-storey concrete ; I building to be erected for the New Zea- < land Drug Company in Stanley Street, i Two additional storeys are to be made I to the warehouse of L. J. Pegler, Albert > btreet The contractors nre Messrs. ' J. T. Julian and Sons and a start has been made upon the work. That the boom period when houses . were selling at inflated prices has passed is quite evident, and in the opinion of one land agent spoken to on the suhject we have once again got back to normal. He admitted the demand for dwellings was as acute ns everj hufc sajd pur chasers now were few and far between, and to make a deal at the present time took some doing. Houses up to £1000 in price, cottages of course, could be sold on a £50 deposit, but even then people showed a disinclination to go beyond the second section, and the offer to run a prospective buyer out in a motor car was not generally accepted. The people who wanted a house on a small deposit (and big deposits were now dreams of the past) preferred to live as | close to Queen Street ac possible, rather than get out into the fresh air of the suburbs. Buyers now pondered long before signing ngreementg, and anything sold had to carry the value. Lately the prices of dwelling houses have dropped, and there is an absence of the speculative clement, but there is little or no falling off in the prices of houses near the city centre. The dominant factor in the New York construction record continues to be speculative residential building, including single-family dwellings nnd apartments. This class of structure has accounted for 106,220.000 dollars, during the first quarter of this year' compared with 107.564,000 dollars "during the corresponding period of 1023 Commercial and educational buildings have also shown considerable increases, but they do not affect the situation in any such measure as residential construction does. Last spring the volume of construction started was .so large that it caused a jam; commitments exceeded the capacity of the building industry the labour supply was inadequate, and deliveries of the required materials were extremely difficult; the resulting situation was a breakdown of the industry, and the delay of many important projects. This year starts with a programme of construction double that of last year, and construction facilities have increased very little. "The economic loss attributable to the decay and destruction of timber by fungoid and insect attack amounts to at least £1,000,000 per annum in buildings already constructed," reported committee "C" to the Building Conference at Wellington. The Departmental view, after experiments, was that to combat the alarming increase in the depredations of these pests concerted action by sawmillers, timber merchants, builders, owners and local and Government authorities was required. The committee mentioned that in this connection the experience of one member was that treatment by a patent gas had had satisfactory results. Dealing with the financial aspect of town-planning, Dr. I. G. Gibbon, of the British Ministry of Health, at a recent conference, said that the future of townplanning depended on what extent business men took hold of the problem. Economic production depended on the grouping of businesses. Generally that could only be obtained where there was intelligent town planning. He considered the traffic problem could not be solved by traffic facilities. It could only be cured by reducing the traffic, and that could only he done by the proper location of I places for various uses. It was a, question whether they were not to-day pursuing a wasteful path by using their < roads for so much heavy motor-lorry traffic. The hindrance to the use of the railways was loading and unloading. If they had railways from works to warehouses and factories to docks, where loading and unloading unnecessarily were avoided, there would be enormous gain. What price house one can afford to buy or build is a big problem, observes the "New York Herald.' It has always been so, especially with a careful person who does not wish to take upon himself j a burdening financial obligation. Accord- i ing to housing experts, no one should ' pay more than two and one-half times I his yearly income for a house. Some I think that one and a-half times the j income is better, but the majority opinion is that the former is a conservative guide. The British Minister of Health was recently asked in Parliament whether he ' was aware that houses built of concrete j hollow blocks sixteen years ago in Scot-1 land had had less depreciation and repair costs than neighbouring houses built of stone, brick and rough cast, and also whether it was contemplated to build with this hollow concrete block system, which brought in men of the masonry trade as builders and employed a maximum number of unskilled men in the making of blocks, using clinker from j refuse destructors. It was stated in I reply that the Government was aware that concrete construction had in many cases,, proved satisfactory, and where local circumstances were favourable concrete building in some approved form would, continue to be used.- J