Living is easy in Carterton, says software engineer Tim Wright. The climate is “lovely and hot”, there are good cafés, and the kids can free-range.
It’s so good, it’s worth the occasional hour-or-so each way commute to his office in Wellington – and given he can work from home most of the time, the distance is even less of a problem now than it might have been in the past.
Many of us have changed the way we work in the last few years. Recent research shows that 94% of people want to work from home at least part of the time, and many of those who can already do – opening up more remote out-of-town spots as viable options for those with careers in our big cities.
So this year, when we crunched the data to find New Zealand’s most liveable suburbs – based on criteria like house prices, sunshine hours, crime rates and amenities – we also decided to look for the working from home Sweet Spots – great places to live which are on the fringes of some of our big cities.
We’ll reveal our 2022 Sweet Spots – our picks for the most liveable suburbs in each region of New Zealand, and crown our overall winner – on Saturday. Find out more about how we calculated all our winners here.
Cost was a bonus factor for Wright in picking his suburb – he could buy a home that really appealed, paying in the low $600,000s for a three-bedroom, 110sqm, 1960s cottage on a 666sqm section, rather than Wellington’s $1.05m median price tag.
The median price here over the past three months is $672,489.
Wright’s father and sister also live in the Wairarapa town, the supermarket’s two minutes away, and so’s the train station, he says.
“My sister has two kids a similar age to mine. At the weekends, they free-range: They grab scooters, skateboards or bikes and hang out with their friends,” he says. “Everyone I meet is friendly, and it’s a welcoming community.”
Wright commutes into Wellington to his company’s office “one day a week, sometimes two, and sometimes not at all”.
The commute takes about an hour if he leaves at 5am, or an hour-and-a-half if he leaves at 7.30am to drop his children to school in Upper Hutt on the way.
“I go in now and then to catch up with colleagues based there, have coffee and so on. Working for Microsoft, I’m collaborating with people around the world, and I’m not often on a project with my Wellington team members.”
Carterton has a co-working space that he sometimes uses to break up working from home.
Not quite the right places for you? Find your own WFH Sweet Spot using the criteria which matter most to you here.
Lisa Renton has been living in Diamond Harbour for 10 years, but has only been working from home since Covid-19 pandemic hit full force in 2020.
A senior quantity surveyor, she’s spent most of her working life on a building site.
“The thought of working from home was always: ‘That’s not going to work’.”
But now she’s working on a massive project in what she describes as “more of an accounting role”.
“So I took my computers home, set myself up, and it worked really well,” Renton says.
“I’m more productive at home. You don’t get the same interruptions as you do at work,” she says. “(At work) you bounce ideas off each other, but you also end up gossiping.”
She does commute to Christchurch, a 40-minute drive around Lyttelton Harbour and over the hill, for meetings when required. “But we have lots of Teams meetings – it’s commonplace now.”
Diamond Harbour is a “beautiful place” to be, she says, and the three-month median price here is $732,261, just under the median for Christchurch.
“We look over to Lyttelton, we can see all the harbour from here. You can take the dog for a walk at lunchtime and hang out the washing, all the little bits and pieces.”
She also enjoys being able to be flexible for her children, a 13-year-old stepson and four-year-old daughter, and when her daughter starts school, she knows she’ll feel even more part of the local community she already loves.
Having just come back from maternity leave, Warkworth woman Suzi Kelly loves the flexibility of working from home for two of her four working days.
She commutes about 40 minutes to her medical assistance company’s North Shore office the other two days, and her seven-month-old baby goes to daycare.
“If I do have to look after him when I’m working from home, I can put him on my lap,” she says, “but he gets a lot of screen time on those days. I’m like, ‘Can you just watch Mickey Mouse for a bit?’ He likes any Disney movie with singing.”
She and her partner lived in Albany until January last year, but hated the Auckland traffic, and were keen to live somewhere quieter. They now live on 0.4 hectare “in the wops”, five minutes drive from Warkworth town centre.
House prices here are also slightly lower than Auckland as a whole, at $1.21m compared to a median of $1.34m.
The flexibility came in during the pandemic, and has been easy to manage, especially after improvements to her rural wi-fi.
Her partner works full-time in the city, and on their days off, they tend to stick to Warkworth – a laidback town at the head of the Mahurangi River. Kelly says it has “everything there”.
“With the (motorway) extension going in, it’s going to get huge, but at the moment it still has a small-town feel to it.”
Some other working from home escapes suggested by our data included:
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