After three quiet years, property investors are picking up the phone again
Saturday, 29 November 2025
After a couple of years of caution from property investors, the phones are finally ringing again — and a decent summer could turn that spark of interest into something hotter.
Investors are starting to look for somewhere to put their money, and they are turning to commercial rather residential to get a return.
Mortgage director at Lighthouse Financial, Michael Vincent, says investor engagement has noticeably lifted in the past six months, a shift he describes as significant given how subdued the sector has been.
Lighthouse provides a wraparound financial service.
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Vincent said clients say “here's where I am, here's where I want to be when I retire, we go, here's how you get there by taking the least amount of risk.”
They have seen a rise in the number of investors looking for property.
“We’ve seen a substantial uptick in investment clients — and it was hard to go lower than what it was over the last 24 months,” he said.
The first signs of life were coming through pre-approval requests.
“People start by asking for pre-approval — they’ll float an idea,” Vincent said
“There are definitely some headwinds they’re talking to me about, but they can see the market starting to move. And a lot of people can pick a bargain when they see one, especially if interest rates have come down but we haven’t seen those price jumps yet.”
In the last year, it has been first home buyers who have dominated the market - taking up 29% of the country’s property sales. But mortgaged multiple property owners, including investors, were now up to 25.1% of the market.
It’s the first time since April 2021 investors have had that big a share.
Vincent said many clients felt they’ve been stuck in a holding pattern and now he said they were nearly back to 2021 levels.
“Kiwis are just sick of sitting on their hands. We’ve been doing nothing for three years. Even first-home buyers, who’ve been out there, have been pretty cautious given those high interest rates.”
Some of that caution has been justified. Confidence has taken a hit in the last few years, the cost of almost everything has gone up ‒ electricity costs rose by 11.3 % for the average household, local authority rates have increased an average of 8.8% for homeowners ‒ and unemployment is now at 5.3%.
He said there was a bit of a flux period where interest rates were coming down but without the spikes in prices.
Vincent believes the coming summer could help lift confidence across both the economy and the housing market.
“I actually think a lot rides on it for New Zealand,” he says.
“If it’s a miserable summer and it rains all the time — if transactions don’t pick up and card-spend doesn’t pick up — that won’t help sentiment.”
“But if we get a decent summer and people are out spending, feeling a little bit richer, and rolling off those high interest rates, I could see that being quite positive for the economy, but for the housing market as well.”
Many investors, he said, believed the market has already bottomed out.
“People have figured out this is reasonably the bottom.”
And there are other signs too. Consumer spending has been slowly rising and there is always a rush in the lead-up to Christmas (and afterwards, during Boxing Day sales).
But the revival is not being led by the traditional “mum and dad” investor with a home of their own and a single rental.
“Those with one owner-occupied and one investment property — we’re not seeing them re-enter. They just don’t have the equity,” Vincent said.
Instead, the activity was coming from seasoned investors with multiple properties and access to capital. Some are reshaping their portfolios entirely.
“We’re seeing a lot of large portfolio holders shifting out of residential investment and starting to look at commercial property instead.”
Vincent said they were also seeing people who are buying to with a strategy to improve their capital gain quickly.
“Kiwis have realised we had a really good run for a long time. You almost had to try to lose money in the property market — if you bought anything, it would go up. That’s not what’s going to happen going forward.”
With investor activity rising and sentiment improving, their share of the market is beginning to close in on first-home buyers, who have held the top spot for several years.
For now, the return is measured rather than exuberant — but a strong, sunny summer could help cement a rise in confidence.
Vincent said he thought they would start to see some sustained pressure on house prices coming through in the first months of the New Year.