By Lucy Craymer, Reuters
Photo: ABC / Luke Bowden
Analysis - A dramatic boom-bust cycle in New Zealand's housing market has left many Kiwis and investors scarred and an economy struggling to fire, turning what was once a trusted strategy for creating wealth into a period of unease and potentially smaller future returns.
New Zealand has traditionally relied on housing as an engine of growth, but the current shakeout in the property sector has been particularly telling on the economy, dragging it into contraction in three of the past five quarters.
Two and a half years of flat to falling house prices has basically just been a heavy wet blanket on top of the economy, said ANZ chief economist Sharon Zollner.
The current gloom in the sector is rooted in more than a decade-long affordability crisis that cam
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