New Zealand – Who are the foreign buyers ?

In the past few weeks I’ve had a look at how New Zealand talks about foreign buyers in the real estate industry. I basically heard « China » and « Chinese », while what i found in terms of figures and data revealed a very different situation.

It’s indeed often captivating to see how the press, and the industry as a whole gets a perception that differs from the reality.

Chinese buyers – opinion versus facts

It’s become common practice for real estate agents to list their properties on websites aiming Chinese buyers specifically. There is even a property portal dedicated to Chinese buyers called www.Hougarden.com, which claims over 170,000 unique visits each month[1], about half of which are from people in mainland China.

Yet let’s look for a while at WHO foreign buyers were in New Zealand in the first three months of this year. Data collected by the Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) shows that Chinese represent only 29.5% of foreign buyers in New Zealand[2] as you can see below in the graph :

Australia, United Kingdom, USA, Singapore, United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong, and also all other countries represented together more than 70% of foreign buyers in the country.

This situation is quite similar in other countries such as Spain[3] or Portugal[4] where real estate actors often only think about UK and French buyers when other nationalities actually represent over 65% of all foreign buyers in the country.

Of course that doesn’t mean that nothing should be done about UK, French, or Chinese buyers. But what about the others ?

If you would like more information about how to adopt a complete strategy when it comes to foreign buyers, feel free to email me at reiser@listglobally.com or connect with me on Linkedin.

For more info about the foreign buyers in New Zealand, feel free to check some more details[5] here below :

New Zealand

1089 homes sold to non-residents (Jan – March 2016)
Number of sales / tax residency of buyers: