2 min read
Author: Andrew Nicol
Managing Director, 20+ Years' Experience Investing In Property, Author & Host
One of the questions I hear most often is: “How long will my tenant stay in my property?”
Because you don’t want to buy a property, rent it out, then 6 months later, they’re gone.
Then you’d have to keep paying the mortgage without rent coming in …
Luckily, I own a property management company. So, I dug into our internal data to see how long tenants really stay.
I looked at all the tenancies that have ended in 2026 (so far) at Opes Property Management.
And asked: “When the tenants left, how long had they been in the house?”
Here’s what the data says:
So, the vast majority of tenancies last at least a year.
But sometimes you get lucky and a tenant stays for a long time. The longest-standing tenant in the analysis was there for 3.5 years.
Whenever you run the numbers on an investment property, you need to factor in that you won’t have a tenant all the time.
I like to assume that you’ll get 2 weeks of vacancy each year. (Or 4 in Auckland, because the rental market is a bit slower right now).
I also like to assume that you’ll have to pay a fee to your property manager each year to find a new tenant.
But if the average tenant stays for 15 months … then you know that those assumptions are on the conservative side.
Because in real life, the average investor isn’t replacing their tenant every 12 months.
That said, there are always outliers. The shortest tenancy in the dataset was just 2 days.
That sounds like an absolute disaster.
Here’s what happened.
That tenant signed up for a rental property. Then, just a few days later, had to relocate for work.
They’d signed up for a fixed-term tenancy, so ultimately, they kept on paying until the landlord found a new tenant. But this example shows that life happens.
And while the average tenant might stay for 15 months, 25% might still turn over in less than a year.
That could be because the tenant is going through:
Or, that they signed up for a shorter term (e.g. 6 months).
That’s where a good property manager matters.
Because when something goes wrong, they need to move quickly and get the property re-tenanted.
The headline is: Three out of four completed fixed-term tenancies lasted at least a year.
I still think you should run the numbers, factoring in vacancy every year. But you can sleep easy knowing this is a conservative assumption.
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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