Another migration-fuelled housing boom had seemed like it might be a story for three-to-five years time, but the speed of the comeback of large-scale inbound migration means we need to be thinking hard about the issue right now

Talking about immigration is like talking about racism, its only ever in a negative light so talking about it is best avoided altogether. There are even bigger issues like total world population control but nobody wants to even start on that one. We are a hopeless for a so called intelligent species, at some point we will just fly into a brick wall but I have given up worrying about it.

Well said. Personally don’t believe we have actually caught up on the housing shortage, despite what ANZ economists think, still ever increasing amounts of rough sleepers in nice parts of Wellington, rents still too high. Migration is my number one election issue and we definitely need to start talking about it. We need a plan, not this seemingly haphazard accumulation displacing our existing populations. 

I'm not sure why this is a surprise to anyone.

Migration was high before covid.

No one came for 2 years or so.

Demand to come to NZ after covid was only going to be higher again, because as much as people in NZ are upset at their government, people elsewhere are even more so with theirs.

We are just swapping one problem for another.

There won't be a migration-fuelled housing boom, because migration isn't what drives the market. House prices didn't fall when the borders were slammed shut in March of 2020, and they're not going to take off just because we open them again. This is an old wives' tale.

Unsustainable levels of long-term migration will cause all sorts of other issues, just like it always has. However, any change in trajectory for our property market will be driven by other factors like availability of credit which, regardless of how many digger operators and halal butchers we invite to come and live here, is the determining factor in people's ability to participate in the market and bid prices up.

The equally important question is who is coming to NZ. Are there highly skilled nurses, engineers and teachers? Or low skilled fruit pickers?

What is the migration breakdow

i believe the stats are not that clear.

Permanent arrivals or are temporary workers, long term holiday dudes,  included or students or what.

 Students and workers don't buy houses 

Pacific island immigrants are a net negative taker of $$$.

They shack up with family, get benefits, and get subsidized homes...  All without contributing much tax ( working for cash). There are 14000 that are " known of" overstayers.

And .. we had to apologise to these criminals for arresting them before thier breakfast. 🙄🙄🙄

 Policing by culture by Race, by time.

Immigration decisions come after the decision on what our best population number should be.

Being a short term thinking culture we are deciding neither.  

There’s a massive skills shortage on the horizon because of an aging workforce and because only 46% of kids are attending school regularly.

We’ll need millions of immigrants to fill the skills gap and pay tax as these kids will be uneducated and unemployable.

It’s a disgrace but the govt is doing nothing. 

We have 2 vacancies that we have been advertising for months and am unable to fill, one is around $90k and the other $70k-$75k. Good house close to town, good reputation as an employer, and there are many other dairy farms around me desperate for staff.

In the latest immigration stats was there any breakdown of age or intentions. There may be a one off burst of immigrant workers getting residency under the new laws being able to bring their families to NZ. I have one worker who has gone home to return with his wife and kids. So one becomes four.    

By now everyone should understand that the government (and RBNZ) only act AFTER things have gone too far.  

In saying that I welcome immigration provided it is skilled people that will add value to our country. 

We want more rental housing but we don't want more landlords, potentially making, shock horror, money!!, we want tourism but we don't want air b’n’b, we are outraged about house price rises but then wonder about why the economy is stuffed when they consistently fall in price, we want higher wages but we don't want higher costs, we don't want inflation but we want everything that causes it, we want the jobs, investment and philanthropy the wealthy supply but we can't stand to see them enjoy their riches, we want to tax a small group of people more and more because we've been led to believe by Labour, Greens and the Maori Party that it's a rigged game and there is no hope for anyone other than the already rich, and that's the greatest most insidious lie of all, after all, if there is no hope of making it, you better vote for the parties that will steal it from everyone who has it and give it to you. Sooner or later NZ will wake up to the fact that we can't tax an ever shrinking pool to have first world everything, we need to utilise our resources, yes, responsible mining, we have an abundance of untapped resources and we need to attract high paying industries paying highly paid people to our land, we need more people to expand the tax base, the 2-3% of people paid more than 180k a year pay 24% of the tax, we need a lot more of them, we need to stop this division based baiting by the left and get on with it, they are a disaster because they have no idea how to turn a dollar into 2 and they have never run anything requiring a profit to survive. We need more people to broaden the tax base, Australia gets it, why can't we?

As to housing, the reason there is already signs of a potential turn is you don't solve housing by interfering in a market, all we have done is suppressed animal spirits, CCCFA just stops individuals and banks agreeing to fund ambitious ideas, because apparently the public need to be saved from themselves, LVR’s, DTI’s just stop people doing what they would naturally do, you haven't made housing affordable by making it impossible to borrow and buy one, we have certainly deterred investors, they aren't interested and more and more places are having chronic rental shortages, this is entirely predictable, we borrowed our rental policies from the UK, only we made them worse, they are in rental disaster land, crippling rent increases and growing shortages of property to rent, how dumb is copying something you can already see does not work, is it good policy to throw renters under the bus in favour of those who can buy a home? Just because landlords were lucky enough to benefit from a 30 yr boom, they didn't cause it just like you don'cause kiwi saver to rise or drop the govt has identified 3 main drivers of house price growth over the last 3oyrs and investors have nothing to do with it, not even mentioned in the report, firstly 30 year's of structural declines in interest rates, the main driver, secondly, not enough land or intensification of land to build more affordable property, a distant third but interesting seeing as Parker said he didn't rate this but it's important, absence of a capital gains tax, not on investors but on home owners that's where the vast majority of free gains are, if you want to raise revenue it has to be included, the way the tax dept see this goes like this, everyone's spending is someone else income, when you rent a home the govt gets the tax on the rent received by the LL. If you weren't paying off your house you would be paying rent and that would be taxed when the LL gets it, so by paying off your house as far as IRD are concerned they are missing out twice, once on the rent you would have paid if u weren't using that money to pay off your asset and again on the tax free capital gain you derive from the home, interesting thought, if you actually stop houses growing in value is there any point in spending 30yrs paying one off, maintaining it, paying rates and insurance, might as well rent, but if house prices don't increase, no point in buying one to rent out, if owners and investors can't make a buck out of housing then who can make a buck out of building them, if no one builds, massive housing shortage, NZ’s problem is we don't seem to like people making a buck, but unless someone does, nothing actually happens, careful what you wish for

If the IRD functioned like Immigration NZ, then tax would also never be an honest pre-election topic

just imagine "We've implemented a new 39% top tax rate but there is a 2 year backlog to apply this to everyone"

or "Sorry to report that your tax refund application has been delayed because your case worker has left the department, a new case worked will be assigned soon"

"We collected 4.5 billion in tax during January 2023 but aren't quite sure where it came from"

Okay I'm stretching a little with the last one but the point is that immigration is blunt and dysfunctional.

Passenger statistics for the year to date show only a net increase of 9,500 people arriving in NZ.  In March there were a net 24,335 departures, while in April there were a net 34,339 departures. 

If immigration really were ramping up we would have sky rocketing rents, vacancy rates below 1%, and house prices increasing.  In other words, we would look like Australia.  But we don't.

Instead it looks to me like for every visa we issue, two Kiwi's leave the country.

Excellent article David and I absolutelly agree.  Nothing has changed to transform New Zealand's house building capacity so another population surge would run the risk of yet another cycle.

New Zealand also needs to urgently upgrade its immigration statistics, which are woeful following misguided reprioritisation by SNZ.

Is there some co-ordinating presence that says, right, we'll let 20,000 workers in in March? Or did that just kind of happen? (As it certainly seemed to.)

Don't be silly. This lot couldn't co-ordinate a piss up in a brewery.

The fascinating dynamic is that this is happening immediately after most investors got locked out of buying, can't get finance to build, or the tax policies make it hard to even hold, so they're giving the keys to social housing, reducing rental capacity even more. 



I had the housing crunch pegged for late Q3, I'm revising it for July (which means it's happening now but it won't be a political problem for another few weeks. 



I'm glad this will be an election issue. Rents, fuelled by wage inflation, are going to jump and Labour is going to have to explain how we got to this point on their watch.