Bogus poll story, again
From the Herald
[Juwai.com] has surveyed its users and found 36 per cent of people spoken to bought property in New Zealand for investment.
34 per cent bought for immigration, 18 per cent for education and 7 per cent lifestyle – a total of 59 per cent.
There’s no methodology listed, and this is really unlikely to be anything other than a convenience sample, not representative even of users of this one particular website.
As a summary of foreign real-estate investment in Auckland, these numbers are more bogus than the original leak, though at least without the toxic rhetoric.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The Minister of Housing has come up with some more numbers.
According to IRD 11% of the number of taxpayers who are identified as having income/losses from rentals property are non resident.
Problems with this are .
Not specific to Auckland, where the numbers of rental houses are highest.
Treats each owner as one data point when they could be one house or 10.
Strangley the total number of houses isnt mentioned .
Overseas resident is vague as could be NZ citizen.
Another report for you to dismiss Prof Lumley ?
9 years ago
That’s real data, but as you note it isn’t perfect.
I would have said the biggest problem is the one you raise, that ‘foreign’ includes NZ people who temporarily or permanently move overseas but keep their NZ house, but as the government points out there’s also the problem that the data may be incomplete. That’s why they’re bringing in changes on October 1.
I assume the reason it doesn’t mention total number of houses is that this isn’t part of whatever IRD dataset they used and would require going back to the original returns or some more basic data. That’s the problem with all these approaches to the problem based on convenience data that’s just lying around.
The changes starting on October 1 will allow collection of detailed data, but only from that point forward. Also, I’m not convinced (and you don’t seem to be convinced either) that tax residency is the right definition of ‘foreign’.
Finding the right definition is harder than it looks: eg, a citizenship/visa-based definition would not count Kiwis living overseas as foreign, but would count Australians living in NZ as foreign, since we don’t get visas.
9 years ago