Property Investment
3 min read
Author: Andrew Nicol
Managing Director, 20+ Years' Experience Investing In Property, Author & Host
Over 126,000 Kiwis permanently left New Zealand. In just the last 12 months.
We have never seen so many NZers leave.
Now, property investors are asking: “Is that the real reason why property prices are flat?”
And that’s why you need to know about net migration.
Net migration is the difference between:
If more people are coming than leaving – net migration is positive.
If it’s the other way around. Net migration is negative.
For most of the last 25 years, migration made our population bigger. More people came than left.
Those people need somewhere to live. They push the demand for housing up. That makes property investors happy. You tend to get higher rents and higher house prices.
Surprisingly, even though lots of Kiwis are leaving. We’re still getting more people moving to New Zealand. So migration is still adding to our population.
But something has changed.
Net migration peaked in the 12 months to October 2023. It added 135,500 people to our population.
More recently, it’s just a touch under 10,000. So net migration is down.
But the truth is … we’re not losing as many Kiwis overseas as you might think.
It’s true that more Kiwis are leaving our shores than ever before.
In 2025, the number of Kiwis leaving in a single year was just over 127,000.
That beats the previous record (in 2012), where 116,000 Kiwis left.
But here’s what most people miss. Our population has skyrocketed. Back in 2012, our population was 4.4 million. Today it is over 5.3 million.
That’s right. We’ve added an extra million New Zealanders in just 14 years.
So those 116,000 Kiwis leaving in 2012 represented a 2.6% loss of our population.
Our most recent ‘record’ loss represented under 2.4% of the population leaving.
And for a reasonable portion of the last 25 years … we’ve consistently lost 2 – 2.5% of our population overseas.
This is business as usual.
The reason today’s migration is noteworthy is that it’s a big bounce back from the Covid times when no one left.
And that brings us to the real reason why people are leaving.
It’s common for the young Kiwis to say that houses are too expensive in NZ, or that the economy isn’t that flash. That there are more opportunities overseas. And that’s why they’re leaving.
And some of that is true.
But as we’ve seen in the above data, young Kiwis often move overseas all the time.
After all, we’re so far away from the rest of the world. It’s a cultural phenomenon that young Kiwis go on the big Overseas Experience (OE).
But Covid disrupted that. The virus was raging overseas. It wasn’t here. And even if young people left … there was no guarantee they could get back in.
Kiwis living overseas started moving back here. And some people who would have gone on an OE delayed their plans.
Some of those people are now deciding to either move back overseas or go on the OE they never got to have.
And there are three main points I’m trying to get across:
As that effect runs its course … and as the Kiwi economy picks up … I’d expect the number of leavers to settle down.
Don’t expect the departure gates at Auckland airport to stay full forever.
The migration numbers were much worse in mid-2012. Since then, NZ house prices are up 122%.
Migration (just like house prices) tend to go through cycles.
Managing Director, 20+ Years' Experience Investing In Property, Author & Host
Andrew Nicol, Managing Director at Opes Partners, is a seasoned financial adviser and property investment expert with 20+ years of experience. With 40 investment properties, he hosts the Property Academy Podcast, co-authored 'Wealth Plan' with Ed Mcknight, and has helped 1,894 Kiwis achieve financial security through property investment.
This article is for your general information. It’s not financial advice. See here for details about our Financial Advice Provider Disclosure. So Opes isn’t telling you what to do with your own money.
We’ve made every effort to make sure the information is accurate. But we occasionally get the odd fact wrong. Make sure you do your own research or talk to a financial adviser before making any investment decisions.
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