Foreign invasion just a myth say real estate agents

The Greens have called on the Government to stop overseas investors from swooping on the New Zealand property market, but real estate agents believe the issue has been blown out of proportion.

The call came in response to media reports that international buyers were snatching up New Zealand property as the dollar dropped, interest rates fell and the market slowed after five years of runaway growth.

Greens co-leader Russel Norman said that overseas speculators could undermine the efforts of first home buyers.

"We believe land should be owned by New Zealand citizens and residents only and our laws should be changed to say that. We welcome ex-pats coming home and people coming to this country to live. But why should we allow Singaporean, Australian or American speculators to buy investment properties in our country, shutting first time home buyers from the market?"

One of the Waikato's top real estate agents, Carolyn Evans, said that she hadn't noticed a change and thought that the "problem" had been exaggerated.

"I don't think there are hundreds of people just buying up New Zealand. We do sell houses to overseas buyers but it isn't a big deal the percentage is very minimal. The people I've been dealing with recently tend to be first home buyers and people moving to Hamilton from other parts of the country."

Realestate.co.nz CEO Alistair Helm said international traffic now made up 27 per cent of realestate.co.nz's internet traffic up five per cent from August last year.

"The report makes it sound like New Zealand is for sale but it isn't. Undoubtedly there is a number of overseas buyers looking, after all it's the only way they can look at a property. Looking at real estate is escapist. That's why we have so much traffic, people go online just to look sometimes, it's not like a bank website where you have to use it."

The influx of international browsers didn't necessarily mean that there had been an influx in sales, especially in the Waikato, Mr Helm said.

"On an average month our site gets around 270,000 unique visitors. For the Waikato in an average month around 370,000 pages are viewed, about 12,000 pages viewed per day. The Waikato is the region of the country that has the lowest ratio of international visitors, just 17 per cent the top region for international traffic is Nelson Bays with 39 per cent of all visitors from outside New Zealand."

TradeMe's head of property, Brendon Skipper, agreed the foreign ownership issue had been exaggerated. "To put it in perspective, around 10 per cent of our property site traffic is international."

- © Fairfax NZ News