‘Foreign’ buyers
From the Listener this week, and now on noted.co.nz
This week, new data emerged from the ASB Bankshowing that foreign buyers are a much more significant part of the overheated housing market than had previously been established; that is, between 11% and 20% rather than the piffling 3.3% nationally – and 7.3% in the Auckland market, ground zero for our property frenzy – previously reported by Statistics New Zealand.
- It’s not new data – it comes from exactly the same StatsNZ report (if either the ASB report or the StatsNZ report had been linked, this would have been easier for the reader to find out)
- Not foreign buyers. The 11% includes 8% of New Zealand residents who aren’t citizens at the time they buy the house. The 11-21% range includes 0-10% of buyers who are foreign commercial entities. Because ASB didn’t have any new data, they don’t know what proportion of the commercial entities are local, but they were guessing it was at the low end. So, ASB’s figure for foreign buyers is 3-13%, with a guess that it’s towards the low end.
- In fact, even the 3% counts people on work visas buying a house or apartment to live in as foreign buyers. You could maybe argue that people on work visas should be driving up rental costs instead, but it’s not that obvious a case.
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 LINZ information is looking at ‘tax residency’ not nationalities. Tax residency would cover those people with non NZ passports living in NZ
https://www.linz.govt.nz/land/land-registration/prepare-and-submit-your-dealing/property-tax-compliance-requirements/property-transfers-and-tax-residency-data/property-transfers-and-tax-residency-data-faqs
The data I have seen always talks about ‘foreign tax residents’, who by definition cant be NZ residents of any nationality
6 years ago
No, this turns out not to be the case.
The LINZ tax data refers to tax residency, but it’s unavailable for about 40% of transfers. So-called ‘affinity’ data is available for essentially all transfers, but it’s not tax residency.
The ASB research note goes into this in quite a lot of detail.
6 years ago