First option to buy may go to Govt tenants

Press, 12 May 1984, Page 1

First option to buy may go to Govt tenants

By

PATRICIA HERBERT,

property reporter

The Cabinet may respond to public pressure by giving tenants in surplus Government houses first option to buy; a reversal of normal procedure.

The matter has been referred to it for consideration by the Lands and Survey Department which is responsible for the disposal of extra housing stock. A directive was issued to all departments last year to supply lists of the properties they no longer needed to the department for urgent sale. The move, expected to return about $lOO million to Treasury coffers, provoked grumbles of protest from church groups and social welfare agencies throughout the country. The superintendent of the Christchurch Methodist Mission, the Rev. John Roberts, said that the houses should be transferred to the Housing Corporation and rented as State units to low-income earners. Failing this, he said that sitting tenants should be given first right of purchase with assistance provided by the corporation to minimise the risk of families being turned out of their homes. The director of land administration at the Lands and Survey Department’s head office in Wellington, Mr lan Campbell, said yesterday that both options had been put before the Cabinet and he hoped a decision would be made fairly soon. “The main thrust of the argument” was that existing tenants be given preferential treatment, he said. The other proposal—handing the houses over to the corporation to let—was tied in with it but had not yet been

given any real consideration. The department meantime had “put a hold on the sale of occupied residential dwellings,” Mr Campbell said. Christchurch will be particularly affected whatever the Cabinet decides because it has a large pool of surplus departmental stock, including 129 houses. Most are in the area from St Albans to Waltham and were bought for motorway construction but are now not needed. A spokesman for the department’s district office, Mr Arthur Dobbs, said that about six properties had been disposed of to date—a mixture of vacant homes and sections—and that “a few commercial buildings” in Wordsworth Street, Sydenham, were due to be put on the market. They were being sold by tender but the response had

been patchy. Speaking “off the cuff,” Mr Dobbs said that the highest number of bids received for a single property had been seven. Others had attracted “only one or two.” Some of the offers had been “quite good” but some had been rejected because they had not met the reserve price set by the Valuation Department. Mr Dobbs attributed the lack of keen buyer-interest to the poor standard of some of the properties and to “the general tightness” of mortgage money. Christchurch was “a bit out of step with other centres” where the response had been “very good,” he said. Mr Campbell confirmed this saying that the feedback he had recieved from the department’s district offices indicated that they were having no difficulty in selling their surpluses.