Housing market data fuels call for foreign buyers ban in New Zealand

Opposition lawmakers on Monday stepped up calls for a ban on non-residents buying New Zealand homes, accusing the government of skewing data in order to play down the role of overseas purchases in the country's housing crisis.

Figures out Monday showed overseas tax resident buyers and sellers were behind just 3 percent of New Zealand property transfers, Land Information Minister Louise Upston said on the release of data covering the April-June period.

"Over this time, the proportion of transfers involving overseas tax resident buyers is 3 percent, and the proportion of transfers involving overseas tax resident sellers is also 3 percent. This is similar to the previous quarter," Upston said in a statement.

The data was not a register of foreign ownership, but was intended to give useful information on the property market over time, she said.

However, the main opposition Labour Party said the government was using selective data to mislead the public about "foreign speculators" and underestimating their impact on the New Zealand housing market by up to 75 percent.

The government had removed the ability for corporations and trusts to be identified as foreign, skewing the data from the start, Labour Party leader Andrew Little said in a statement.

"They have also counted foreign students and temporary workers who don't intend to stay in the country or live in the home they've bought as New Zealanders," said Little.

The Labour Party wanted all these groups banned from buying New Zealand homes.

"The Land Information data shows 2,300 properties were bought by non-residents in the last three months. A further 5,700 were bought by people here on temporary visas who did not intend to occupy the property," he said.

"That's 8,000 houses sold to foreign buyers in the past three months -- 13 percent of total sales and four times the number the government is claiming."

Opposition lawmakers have repeatedly claimed that non-resident buyers are driving an overheated housing market, particularly in the biggest city of Auckland -- home to a third of the population and the center of the country's chronic shortage of affordable homes.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand announced last month that it was tightening loan-to-value ratios on mortgage lending after repeating its warning that the Auckland property market was a risk to the country's financial stability.

The country's four main commercial banks have also announced that they have stopped lending to foreign buyers. Endit