Building activity

Updated: 17 March 2010

Value of all building work fell, led by residential building work

Statistics New Zealand’s quarterly data on ‘building work put-in-place’ puts an estimated gross dollar value on actual building work performed on residential and non-residential buildings.

Figure 5 shows that the price-adjusted trend value of all ‘building work put-in-place’¹ has been generally rising and reached a high point in the December 2007 quarter. Since then there has been a fairly steep downwards trend which has continued into the latest June 2009 quarter.

The total unadjusted value of all ‘building work put-in-place’ in the December 2009 year was $10.823 billion, down 13.7 percent from the previous year. The contribution of residential building work was 54.3 percent in the year to December 2009, which was down from 58.4 percent in the year to December 2008.

Figure 5: Value of building work put-in-place - Constant price values at September 1999 quarter prices (to September 2009).

1. The price adjusted value of building work put-in-place has been used in this report until the March 2009 quarter where it replaced by the nominal value of building work put-in-place to allow for a more direct comparison between the value of building work put-in-place and value of building consents.