The rise and rise of ‘residential capitalism’ as in the financialisation of the housing market, has been seen as part of the transformation of the structure and institutions of contemporary capitalism. When focusing on the house, the economic, the social and the cultural have long coalesced, but what is changing is the evolving dynamic between these. The paradox that the conflation of the house as home and the house as capital constitutes, has been identified by Susan Smith (2015) in order to bridge the divide between the home as social space, and the economics of housing. In this paper, we pick up on Smith’s call for more ethnographic and anthropological studies of this housing market phenomenon.

By focusing on second/holiday homes, known as ‘baches’ in the North Island of New Zealand, this study seeks to disaggregate the cultural construction of home from the nature of primary dwelling to understand further how people regard a house as home and as capital investment. The participants in this study are bach-buyers, owners, and sellers on the island of Waiheke, a suburb of the larger metropolitan area of Auckland, New Zealand, which was recently reported as the fourth-equal most unaffordable housing market in the world.