Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland

I'm sure it is about ticking the checkboxes for buyers' expectations, on paper. But the end result is just that: nothing but ticking the box, while failing to deliver the actual benefit the feature implies.

It's kind of like how my house has 4' x 4' closets in the bedrooms so they can be called "walk-in closets," but the extra depth is fucking useless and all it accomplishes is to eat away from the square footage of the actual room. (I'm ripping them out to put in normal reach-in depth closets instead because I hate them so much.)

...Sorry for the rant.

Anyway, the point is that a well-designed apartment or townhouse can be lived in better than a poorly-designed detached house with no windows on two sides because there's a pointless 2-foot gap between buildings just so they can tick the box of "detached," but that's the tradeoff that looks like it's being made here. These things don't even appear to have any greenspace (common or otherwise), while the example I linked to would fit on one of those lots and still have room to be set back from the street the same distance as the other houses as well as a shared back yard.

I think you're right.

Body corporates can be expensive and not having one is foolish. Even with townhouses I anecdotally know someone whose efforts to remediate their leaky house took many more years/dollars than it should have because the overseas owner of the abutting house kept refusing permission for things to do with their shared wall and roof section.