LINZ releases latest property data

LINZ releases latest property data

Land Information New Zealand’s latest property data report shows consistent levels of property transfers involving overseas tax residents, as well as new data on the citizenship and residency status of buyers and sellers.

LINZ Deputy Chief Executive Russell Turner says these figures are gathered by LINZ for property tax purposes and are released each quarter.

Tax residency of buyers and sellers

Covering January to March 2017, the report shows 3 percent of all property transfers involved overseas tax resident buyers and 3 percent involved tax resident sellers. This compares to 2 percent tax resident buyers and 3 percent tax resident sellers in the last quarter of 2016.

Of the remaining transfers over January-March:

• 57 percent of transfers involved buyers who have only New Zealand tax residency. For the October to December 2016 quarter this was similar at 58 percent.

• 40 percent involved buyers who did not need to provide tax information – the majority of these were New Zealand citizens or residents who are buying their main home. This was the same in October to December 2016.

Citizenship and residency of buyers and sellers

This report also includes new figures as a result of changes LINZ made to the tax statement it uses to collect data for property tax purposes.

“Last year we made improvements that mean that in addition to information on the tax residency of buyers and sellers, we also have better data about their citizenship and residency for housing policy purposes. This improved data is available for the vast majority, 87 percent, of property transfers carried out from January to March,” says Mr Turner.

The new data shows that:

• For 82 percent of transfers, one or more of the buyers involved were New Zealand citizens or residents. For 76 percent of transfers, one or more of the sellers involved were New Zealand citizens or residents.

• For 2 percent, none of the buyers involved had New Zealand citizenship or residency although a proportion had student or work visas. For sellers, this was 1 percent.

• For 16 percent, all buyers involved represented corporate or business entities. For sellers there were 23 percent of transfers where all represented corporate or business entities. For almost of all of these corporate/business entities all parties were New Zealand tax residents.

Read the latest report on property transfers and tax residency on the LINZ website.

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