Home Truths: What Recent Data on New Zealand’s Housing is Telling Us
A report by Alan Johnson and Major Campbell Roberts
Introduction
Much of the media commentary frames housing as a market when in fact it is part of a more complex and intriguing housing system. This commentary is dominated by the opinions and analyses of bank economists, real estate agents and occasionally developers. It focuses on the current price of housing, mortgage interest rates and house sales. From time to time the notional yield of housing as rental investments is mentioned and references to rent levels are then made.
Homelessness is discussed in media commentary but not in any context of the housing markets of economists, real estate agents, investors and developers. No attempt is made to consider how housing fortunes and misfortunes are distributed. Rather, homeless people are often presented pathologically as anti-social nuisances to be moved out of sight of shoppers and shopkeepers.
This stocktake of New Zealand’s housing system avoids this market framing and instead attempts to take a systems view although, of course, with references to supply and demand. This systems view considers some of the background to housing demand, such as population changes, household wealth and housing-related debt. Several maps of various parts of the system are offered to help describe the systemic nature of housing. This stocktake does not, however, attempt to integrate these perspectives into an enveloping narrative which might conveniently describe the system.
This paper has nothing to say about house prices, real estate markets or homelessness. This is mainly because these topics are well covered in the analyses and commentary of others. From a systems perspective it is however useful to note that although these topics tend to dominate public debate around housing, they represent only a small proportion of the housing system. In any year less than 5 percent of the housing stock is bought and sold,1 so the prices paid are a flimsy indicator of what all the housing stock is worth. While agreed definitions of homelessness are vexed, people without shelter perhaps number 10,000 at any one time. Even by the broadest measure of severe housing deprivation, the 2023 Census reported that this affected around 112,500 people or one in 40 New Zealanders.2 This comment is not intended to trivialise these people’s experiences but merely to point out that the housing system serves the vast majority of people living in Aotearoa mostly adequately and even well.
It is hoped that this stocktake can be used as a resource in the pre-election debate around housing. This paper offers a substantial body of data from the past five years to inform such a debate although the in-depth interpretation of this data is left to the reader.
1 The Reserve Bank reports that in 2025 there were 94,492 house sales while Statistics New Zealand estimates that in December 2025 there were 2.12 million dwellings in the national housing stock.
2 Statistics New Zealand (2025) Housing in Aotearoa New Zealand pp.166–167.