Why we chose Christchurch: five cities, one spreadsheet

Let's start with the one that felt like home. Auckland is the city that reminds us most of Singapore, and for a while that made it the frontrunner by default. A third of the entire country lives here, spread across two harbours and fifty-something volcanic cones. It's warm-ish, it's humid-ish, it's built around water, and it's unmistakably Asian-influenced in a way no other NZ city is. Every video and photo of Dominion Road, all dumpling shops and bubble tea queues, had us saying the same thing: this could work.

Culture

Roughly two in five Aucklanders were born overseas, and it shows in the best ways. It's home to the largest Polynesian population of any city on Earth, plus huge Chinese, Indian, Filipino and Korean communities. For homesick Singaporeans this matters more than any museum: it's the only city on this list where you can reliably find laksa that doesn't need an apology, yum cha on a Sunday, and a proper Asian supermarket within 15 minutes of wherever you are. Night markets exist. Lunar New Year is an actual event. If food is your love language, and let's be honest, we're Singaporean, it is, Auckland wins this category before anyone else laces up.

Transport

And here's where the Singapore comparison falls apart hard. We are spoiled. We grew up on a system where a train every three minutes is normal and a ten-minute delay makes the news. Auckland is a car city, and not a smooth one: the geography squeezes everyone through a handful of motorway choke points, and there's no ERP and no COE to thin the traffic, just more cars. The City Rail Link helps the inner suburbs and the ferries are genuinely lovely, but for most of the city, driving is life and peak hour is a commitment. Coming from a place where we never owned a car and never needed to, this was a bigger mindset shift than we expected.

Job opportunities

The strongest market in the country, full stop, and it's not close. Most corporate head offices are here, the tech and finance scenes are the deepest, and the sheer range of roles is the closest NZ gets to what we took for granted in Singapore's CBD. Here's the honest advice we'd give any Singaporean planning this move: check Seek and LinkedIn for your exact job title before you fall in love with any city. If your career is specialised, Auckland may quietly be your only realistic option, and that single fact can end the whole comparison before it starts.

Cost of living & housing

Now the bill. Average house values sit around NZ$1.2 million. As Singaporeans we're numb to seven-figure property prices, so the sticker didn't shock us. What shocked us was doing the maths on what that money buys relative to income and commute. You pay near-Singapore-condo money for a house that comes with a one-hour drive, in a country where salaries are generally lower than what we earned back home. The value equation that makes the rest of New Zealand attractive simply doesn't hold in Auckland. It's the one city where we kept asking: if we're paying this much to live far from work, why did we leave?

Community & demographics

Young, international, and the easiest place in NZ to find a ready-made community, including a large and active Singaporean one. There are kopitiam-style cafes, Singaporean grocers, even National Day gatherings. If a soft landing among familiar accents matters to you, nothing else on this list comes close. The flipside is the sprawl: your people might be there, but they're a 40-minute drive away, and "let's meet for supper" stops being a spontaneous thing.

Lifestyle & recreation

Genuinely underrated. Black-sand surf beaches on the west coast, calm swimming bays on the east, the Hauraki Gulf islands a ferry ride away. Think East Coast Park, except it's an entire coastline and the water is actually swimmable everywhere. What Auckland lacks is the alpine postcard: the real mountains, the ones we moved to New Zealand for, are a domestic flight away.

Wellington is the capital, wedged photogenically between steep green hills and a harbour, and it's the city we fell for hardest on paper. Imagine if the whole city had Tiong Bahru's energy: independent cafes, bookshops, people who care deeply about coffee and will tell you so. It's small, about 215,000 people in the city proper, but it carries itself like somewhere three times the size.

Culture

Pound for pound the best in New Zealand. Te Papa, the national museum, is world class and free, a concept that still feels mildly illegal to us. The film industry lives out in Miramar, the craft beer scene is dense, and the cafe culture genuinely rivals Melbourne's. The famous stat is more cafes, bars and restaurants per capita than New York, and every photo of Cuba Street makes it easy to believe. If we were choosing a city purely on where we'd want to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon, Wellington wins.

Transport

The best of the five for living without a car, which our Singaporean hearts appreciated deeply. The centre is properly walkable, the buses and commuter trains are well used by NZ standards, and there's even a cable car. The catch is vertical: many suburbs cling to hillsides, so "10 minutes away" often includes a gradient that Bukit Timah Hill would respect. Walkable, yes. Flat, absolutely not.

Job opportunities

This is where the holiday romance met reality. Wellington's economy leans heavily on government, and the public sector has been through brutal rounds of cuts. The city has actually been losing more people than it gains, which is almost unheard of in New Zealand. Outside government, film and a decent tech scene, the ladder has few rungs, and as foreigners without local networks we'd be starting on the bottom one. In Singapore we're used to an economy that feels like it's permanently hiring. Wellington right now feels like it's holding its breath, and we didn't want to bet our visas on it exhaling.

Cost of living & housing

Softer than it was, which cuts both ways. House prices here have fallen further from their peak than anywhere else in the country, with the city median around NZ$850,000 and central apartments dramatically cheaper. Sounds like a bargain until you learn why Kiwi friends kept using the phrase "character home" with air quotes: much of the stock is old, uninsulated and cold in a way HDB-raised Singaporeans cannot conceptualise until they've experienced an indoor temperature of 12 degrees. Add earthquake risk, which shows up in insurance premiums and in which buildings you'd dare to buy, and the discount starts explaining itself.

Community & demographics

Educated, politically engaged, arts-adjacent. It's a city of policy people, developers and creatives, and by every account the easiest place on this list to find sharp, interesting conversation. But the declining population genuinely spooked us. We're from a country that plans fifty years ahead and grows on schedule. Choosing a shrinking city felt like buying into a fund with a beautiful office and a falling share price.

Lifestyle & recreation

Lovely when the weather permits: hill trails from your back door, harbour swims in summer, the wild south coast. But the wind is not a quirky fun fact, it's a daily lifestyle factor, and we say this as people who thought we understood weather because we'd survived monsoon season. Singapore rain is dramatic but brief. Wellington wind is a personality that lives with you.

Confession: Christchurch was on our list mostly for completeness. Everything we'd absorbed about it secondhand said flat, quiet, still recovering from the earthquakes. Then we visited, the only city on this list we actually saw in person, and it quietly dismantled every one of those assumptions. This is the South Island's anchor city, around 420,000 people on the edge of the Canterbury Plains, with the Port Hills on one side and the Southern Alps filling the horizon on the other. The 2011 earthquakes forced it to rebuild almost from scratch, and what's emerged is the newest city in New Zealand, and one of its fastest growing.

Culture

The rebuild changed the answer here, and this is the part we think Singaporeans in particular will get. We come from a country that treats renewal as a way of life, that tears down and rebuilds and reinvents on a schedule. Christchurch is the only NZ city doing the same thing, just for harder reasons. The new centre has the Riverside Market, which is the closest thing to a hawker centre we have found in New Zealand, a compact laneway dining precinct, and street art on every wall the earthquakes left blank. It's not Wellington and doesn't pretend to be. It's a city still writing itself, and after a lifetime in a country that's always under construction, that felt weirdly like home.

Transport

Flat is a superpower, and you only appreciate it once you notice how much of Wellington and Dunedin sits on a hill. Christchurch is one of the easiest cycling cities anywhere, with a growing network of separated cycleways, and driving is what driving was promised to be: 20 minutes means 20 minutes, and parking exists. Public transport is buses only and honestly mediocre, which stung our MRT-calibrated souls, but the city is easy enough that it matters less than we feared. And then there's the thing that quietly moved Christchurch up our list: the airport is the South Island's hub, with a direct Singapore Airlines flight home. When your parents are getting older and a 10-hour direct flight is the difference between "we'll come for Chinese New Year" and "we'll see", that one route carries a lot of emotional weight.

Job opportunities

The pleasant surprise of the whole exercise. Canterbury's economy has been outgrowing the national average, with real strength in construction, health, manufacturing, agritech and a genuine tech and aerospace cluster. It doesn't have Auckland's depth, and we won't pretend otherwise. But it's the strongest job market outside Auckland right now, and unlike Wellington it's expanding rather than contracting. For us the question was never "which city has the most jobs", it was "which city has enough of our jobs, growing in the right direction". Christchurch cleared that bar with room to spare.

Cost of living & housing

This is where Christchurch runs away with it, and where the Singaporean brain short-circuits a little. Average house values sit around NZ$800,000. Convert that to Singapore dollars and you're in the territory of a resale flat in a mature estate. Except here it buys a standalone house, on your own land, with a garden and a garage and sky. Not a 99-year lease, freehold. More importantly for us, Christchurch is the one major centre where buying a section and building new is still a realistic plan for ordinary people, with fast-growing districts like Selwyn and Waimakariri right next door. We're a couple who grew up assuming landed property was for other people. Here, it's the normal path. That reframing alone was worth the whole scouting trip.

Community & demographics

Growing and diversifying fast. Canterbury has been the fastest growing region in the country, and a lot of that growth is people running our exact spreadsheet and reaching our exact conclusion: families and migrants moving for the value equation above. The Filipino, Indian and Chinese communities have expanded rapidly, the Asian grocery situation is improving every year (we did our due diligence, obviously), and the city runs on a settled, family-first rhythm. It's less anonymous than Auckland and less insular than the smaller cities. People have room for newcomers, in every sense.

Lifestyle & recreation

The pitch that sold us: beach before work, mountains on the weekend. New Brighton and Sumner beaches are inside the city limits, the Port Hills trails start where the suburbs end, and world-class skiing, tramping and lakes sit 90 minutes to two hours away. Banks Peninsula alone would be a national attraction anywhere else. Growing up, "nature" meant MacRitchie on a Sunday morning, planned, paved and shared with half of Singapore. The idea that the Southern Alps are just there, visible from the supermarket carpark, permanently, for free, still hasn't fully landed for us.

Dunedin is the Edinburgh of the south, literally: founded by Scottish settlers, draped over steep hills at the head of a long harbour, and full of the best Victorian architecture in the country. From every photo and video we pored over, the older streets have a Georgetown in Penang quality, that feeling of a place where the heritage isn't curated, it's just still standing. It's a university city of about 135,000 where roughly one person in seven is a student, which gives it an energy completely out of proportion to its size.

Culture

Distinctive rather than big. The "Dunedin sound" is a real music genre this city gave the world, there are great little galleries and bookshops, and the student calendar keeps things humming. By all accounts it's the most atmospheric city on this list to simply walk around, in the way that parts of Katong or Joo Chiat are: the buildings themselves do half the storytelling.

Transport

The weakest of the five, and we say this with love. It's buses only, and the hills are legendarily steep. Baldwin Street here holds the world record for the steepest residential street, which is a fun fact right up until it's your commute in July with ice on the ground. Two people raised on escalators and covered walkways had a lot of feelings. The upside is scale: the city is small enough that nothing is truly far, and the airport connects to the main centres easily.

Job opportunities

Narrow, and honest about it. The University of Otago and the health sector dominate, the massive new hospital build is pumping construction and health jobs into the city, and there are pockets of tech and manufacturing. If your career fits those lanes, Dunedin is a genuinely great deal. Ours didn't fit cleanly, and while remote work closes part of that gap, we've heard enough stories about visa applications and job markets to know we didn't want "part of the gap" doing that much load-bearing work.

Cost of living & housing

The cheapest housing of the five, with the median around NZ$650,000 and genuinely characterful homes at prices that made us double-check the currency. But here's the education we got: in New Zealand, the purchase price of an old house is a down payment on your relationship with heating. Much of Dunedin's stock is beautiful, draughty and cold, and this is the second-coldest major city in the country. For two people whose bodies are calibrated to 31 degrees and 80 percent humidity, "charming Victorian villa" and "single glazing" in the same listing is a horror pairing.

Community & demographics

A tale of two cities: 20,000 students who turn over every few years, and a settled, older, proudly local population around them. Everyone we've spoken to about Dunedin describes it the same way: warm and unpretentious. But it's also the least diverse city on this list, its population has been close to flat, and we quietly wondered how long it would take two Singaporeans to find their specific corner of it, and where we'd buy fish sauce in the meantime.

Lifestyle & recreation

Wild in the best way. Albatross and penguins live on the Otago Peninsula, twenty minutes from the city centre, which is an absurd sentence to be able to write. Empty surf beaches like St Clair, and Central Otago's lakes and vineyards a short drive inland. If your dream weekend is wildlife and not a single other human on the beach, Dunedin might quietly be your winner. Ours involves slightly more people and significantly more heating.

Queenstown needs no introduction, which is exactly its problem and its charm. Set on Lake Wakatipu beneath the Remarkables, it's the adventure capital of the southern hemisphere and one of the fastest growing districts in New Zealand: roughly 55,000 residents hosting millions of visitors a year. The best analogy we have is this: imagine if people tried to live full-time on Sentosa. Gorgeous, world famous, built for holidays, and the maths of daily life there is exactly as tricky as that sounds.

Culture

Lively, but built for visitors. Great restaurants and bars for a town this size, a packed events calendar, and nearby Arrowtown adds genuine heritage charm. What it lacks is the slow-burn infrastructure of an actual city: the theatres, universities and institutions that give a place depth beyond the holiday. Every conversation is lovely and half of them are with someone leaving in three months.

Transport

A small town with big-city traffic, which offends the natural order of things. The road network was never designed for the visitor numbers it now carries, and peak-season congestion is genuinely frustrating in a way that feels personal when you can see your destination across the lake. The saving grace is the airport, absurdly well connected for the town's size, with direct flights across NZ and Australia.

Job opportunities

Plentiful and precarious at once. Tourism, hospitality and construction hire constantly, but wages have historically lagged the cost of living, much of the work is seasonal, and professional careers outside those industries are thin. Remote workers dodge the problem entirely, which is exactly why so many have moved in, and exactly why housing looks the way it does. If your salary comes from somewhere else, Queenstown is a lifestyle. If it has to come from Queenstown, it's a hustle.

Cost of living & housing

The deal breaker, in bold. Queenstown-Lakes is the most expensive housing market in the entire country, with average values around NZ$1.9 million, ahead of even Auckland, and a rental market that borders on crisis every winter season. Groceries, fuel, a haircut: everything carries a resort premium. We're from one of the most expensive cities on the planet and Queenstown still made us wince. It's Orchard Road pricing on a ski-town salary, and the numbers never came within shouting distance of working for us.

Community & demographics

Young, international and constantly churning. Working holidaymakers and seasonal staff flow through in waves, which makes it wonderfully easy to meet people and genuinely hard to keep them. Underneath the turnover there's a real, warm community of long-term locals, but joining it takes time and, crucially, housing security, which loops you straight back to the previous section.

Lifestyle & recreation

A perfect ten, no notes, no contest. Skiing at Coronet Peak and the Remarkables, the lake, the trails, Fiordland and Wānaka nearby. Nowhere else on this list is in the same universe, and that is precisely what the housing market has priced in. Paradise knows exactly what it's worth.

Laid side by side, each city owned something. Auckland owned jobs and food, Wellington owned culture, Dunedin owned price, Queenstown owned the postcard. Christchurch owned nothing outright and conceded nothing badly, and it turns out that's what choosing a home actually looks like. Not the city that dazzles you in one column, but the one with no column you can't live with.

There's a very Singaporean lesson buried in here too. We grew up optimising: the best school, the best queue, the best deal, the kiasu reflex that never quite switches off. This exercise taught us that choosing a home isn't about winning any single category. It's about finding the place where the whole household breathes easier. For us that's a flat city with mountains on the horizon and a direct flight to Changi.

Your columns will read differently. If your career needs depth, Auckland probably wins your sheet. If you work remotely and live to ski, maybe Queenstown survives the housing row. That's the whole point of laying it out yourself instead of borrowing someone else's conclusion, including ours.