National’s leader won’t deny he’s looking to overturn the country’s foreign buyer ban.
Implemented by the current government in 2018, the ban strictly limited when foreign investors could buy properties in New Zealand.
Earlier in the week, a redacted document shared to Twitter allegedly included details of a possible National Party policy. And last night, Newshub’s Amelia Wade reported that it looked as though the party was set to announce a U-turn, after Christopher Luxon said “we will have more to say” in the next few weeks.
On the AM Show this morning, Luxon was asked about the issue again. “What I want New Zealanders to understand is that New Zealand is the only country in the Asia-Pacific region that is in an economic recession and our number one job has to be to grow this economy,” he said. “Foreign investment in this country is actually a piece of we drive economic growth into New Zealand… so it’s a piece of it and we’re considering that.”
There did need to be restrictions, although Luxon wouldn’t provide any further detail on what those might be.
Speaking to RNZ, Luxon was equally unprepared to rule in or out tampering with the current settings. “Some young people are really struggling, they have now had to pay more for a house over the last six years – average house prices have gone up hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. “They’re now having to pay not 2.5% interest, but 6.5% interest, finding an extra $750 a fortnight on average.”
Meanwhile, Trade Me Property today revealed that the national average asking price for a house fell by 8% in the year ending July, down to $833,850. That’s a smaller decrease than seen earlier in the year, as the housing market looks to stabilise. Wellington saw the largest annual price drop, followed by Auckland and Hawke’s Bay.
And on Twitter, the Herald’s Thomas Coughlan noted that while first home buyers did hold a solid proportion of all property sales at the moment, it was only “high because the market has crashed”.
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