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WELLINGTON, New Zealand: New Zealand will relax a ban on foreigners buying homes in the country to allow some wealthy overseas business investors a single high-value residential property purchase, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said Monday.
The move partially reverses a ban introduced in 2018 by a previous government to cool a runaway housing market fueled by property speculation. Holders of a residency “golden visa” reintroduced by Luxon’s government in April will now be able to buy one home worth at least 5 million New Zealand dollars ($3 million).
Luxon said the move balanced a desire to attract wealthy investors to the country with allaying house price fears. The change stops well short of a full reversal of the policy and would apply only to a small number of wealthy foreigners and a limited number of houses, he added.
The visas, which were intended to draw overseas investors to the country’s businesses, give residency to people investing a minimum NZ $5 million in New Zealand businesses over three years, or NZ $10 million over five years if the money is deposited in less risky investments.
Some visa holders had been ineligible to buy property because they didn’t live in New Zealand for at least six months of the year. That requirement will now be waived.
Luxon’s opponents decried the policy reversal Monday, saying it focused on attracting wealthy foreigners instead of solving domestic problems.
“Many Kiwis are already struggling to buy a home, and he has just made it worse,” opposition Labour housing spokesperson Kieran McAnulty said. “Homelessness is up, unemployment is up, and people cannot afford the basics at the supermarket.”
Push to attract wealthy foreign investors
The government hopes reversing the ban for some will boost economic growth by luring wealthy foreigners to the country during a period of recession.
“We’re a safe haven in a very volatile and uncertain world,” Luxon told reporters in Auckland on Monday, of his government’s pitch to investors abroad. Those investors would create jobs, he said.
Luxon denied the move would lift house prices which have fallen from a 2022 peak. He said applications so far for the residency visa that would allow a home purchase could result in up to NZ $1.8 billion in investment.
Officials have received just over 300 applications for the visas, representing about 1,000 people, government figures showed. Almost 40 percent of applicants were from the United States.
Luxon said the rule that houses must be worth a minimum amount meant that fewer than 1 percent of New Zealand’s houses -– about 10,000 homes -– would be eligible for foreign investors to buy. The majority of those home (about 80 percent) are in the largest city, Auckland, with around 10 percent in the popular skiing and tourism destination of Queenstown, on the South Island, where wealthy foreigners have snapped up bolt holes before.
The average cost of a home in July was NZ $767,250, according to figures from the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand. In Auckland, the average cost was NZ $975,000.
Housing crisis
The ban on allowing foreigners to buy property, which was introduced during a housing affordability crisis, prompted debate about the extent to which foreigners had contributed to ballooning prices and shut out domestic first-time buyers. Figures at the time showed about 3 percent of New Zealand homes were being sold to foreigners, although the number rose to 22 percent in Auckland.
Exceptions to the ban were made for Australians and Singaporeans under trade agreements.
Support for the ban was bolstered by anecdotal tales, never well-substantiated, of wealthy foreigners building doomsday-style bunkers in the scenic Queenstown region.
New Zealand, located in a remote part of the South Pacific, is a popular destination for migrants seeking distance from global tumult and applications to move there often increase during moments of turbulence, according to years of official data.
Luxon’s center-right party campaigned in the 2023 election on a pledge to reverse the ban. His negotiations as part of a coalition governing deal with other political parties, however, forced him to compromise on only a partial rollback.

KANO, Nigeria: A mob burnt a woman to death in central Nigeria over the weekend after accusing her of blasphemy against Islam, police said Monday.
The woman “was set ablaze” on Saturday in a “mob attack” after she made comments about the Prophet Muhammad, police spokesman Wasiu Abiodun in Niger state said in a statement.
He said the woman was a food vendor named Amaye from northwest Nigerian Katsina state.
Abiodun added that the police condemned any act of “jungle justice” and urged members of the public to remain calm during the search for the attackers.
Sharia law operates alongside common law in 12 predominantly Muslim states in Nigeria — including Niger — and blasphemy is punishable by death.
In many cases the accused are killed by mobs without going through the legal process, though the attack on the weekend is not thought to have involved a legal process.
Such attacks are rare though a butcher in the northern city of Sokoto was stoned to death in June 2023 and a Christian college student was killed by Muslim students a year earlier, both after blasphemy allegations.