Each week the NZ Herald's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's an honest assessment of what's next for property. Hosted by Frances Cook.

We've just had one of my favourite times of year – Budget Day, where the government not only tells you where they're spending their billions of dollars, but also what they're assuming will happen in our country over the next few years.

This year, Treasury made an interesting prediction that house prices will flatten off in the next 12 months, finally giving buyers some breathing room.

Take this with a grain of salt, because Treasury also thought house prices might fall over the last year, because of the impacts of Covid-19.

Instead the national average for houses is now $913,000 and depending on whose figure you use, we've seen a price increase of 21-26% over the year.

However, there are reasons to think that prices could actually cool down this time around.

The Government's brought in changes including tougher lending requirements for landlords, and a change to property investment tax rules.

Interest rates are expected to start slowly increasing, which usually cools prices.

There's also a big push to get more houses built.

For the latest podcast I talked to independent economist Tony Alexander.

If you have a question about this podcast, or question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here https://www.facebook.com/FrancesCookJournalist/ Instagram here https://www.instagram.com/francescooknz/ and Twitter here https://twitter.com/FrancesCook