Wealthy buyers rent homes amid global uncertainty
New Zealand’s luxury real estate market is shifting, as global instability and buyer hesitation push ultra-wealthy prospects into “try-before-you-buy” short-term rentals—sometimes paying up to $30,000 a week for access to homes valued between $8 million and $20 million.
Premium listings go cold; rentals heat up
Real estate agent Caleb Paterson, director of Paterson Luxury, said sellers at the top end of the market are turning to high-end leasing strategies as sales activity stalls.
“We’re dealing with a lot of homeowners in that luxury space and the market is not responding where they want [it], so now they're having to reassess all their options,” Paterson told RNZ.
“So, if someone’s willing to come in and pay three times above what the normal weekly rental amount could be for a property, it frees up options for them. It means they’ve got extra income while they're still holding that asset waiting for the market to bounce back.”
Half of Paterson’s current listings are now available for rent—many receiving multiple enquiries before even being publicly marketed.
High-value sales collapse as buyer hesitation grows
REINZ data showed a sharp slowdown in the premium segment. In Auckland, the median time to sell homes over $3.5 million has stretched from 42 days in March 2024 to 64 days in March 2025. In Queenstown, the figure has blown out to 95 days.
“This time last year I'd sold 10 properties, this year I've only sold two up to this point,” Paterson said.
He added that four deals worth more than $20 million had recently fallen through.
“I had one client lose a million dollars on the stock market, another [deal] couldn't progress because the buyer's business was in import and export,” Paterson said. “At the moment, that’s sitting around more like 20% to 25%. We're definitely seeing a big decrease in those deals going through.”
Baby boomer vendors willing to negotiate—still no bites
Some high-end sellers, many of them baby boomers, are prepared to discount—but the buyer pool remains thin, RNZ reported.
“The vendors of one off-market property ‘worth $20 million on paper’ were happy to drop their price to $15 million but even the $5 million price-drop was not enough,” Paterson said.
“We are getting good properties on market [but] we're just not getting that buyer inquiry come through.”
Global uncertainty fuels interest, but not action
International instability is both drawing interest and delaying commitment.
“Some are saying they just don’t want to live under another Trump presidency,” Paterson said. “Others have had New Zealand on their radar for a while and the current visa discussions have reignited that interest.”
He pointed to Canada’s proposed wealth taxes, US political risk, and New Zealand’s distance from conflict zones as growing draws—alongside a decade-low NZ-US exchange rate.
Investor visa sparks demand—but foreign buyer ban still a hurdle
While the revamped investor visa has helped spark new conversations, Paterson said broader policy change is still required.
“The challenge we’ve got is that we don't have the buyers to come through which then releases the equity in that baby boomer category that then flows through to the rest of the market,” he said.
“The ‘golden visa’ changes have been positive and we're seeing more robust conversations from international investors but what we really need to see is a loosening of the foreign buyer policy.”
Paterson noted current discussions about lifting the ban for homes over $5 million, a policy floated by the National Party in 2023.
“There’s now conversations around easing that up for the $5m-plus [market] ... if that came into effect, we would have a large increase of buyers and actually that would enable that cash to flow through the economy.”
That conversation is gaining momentum, with the minister for regulation recently signalling support for reviewing the foreign buyer ban as part of a broader update to overseas investment rules.
