Foreign investment on the rise

At the CB Richard Ellis annual Market Outlook breakfast this week, the firm’s regional director of Institutional Investment Properties, Rob Sewell, said that while New Zealand’s overall market share of global investment flows appeared to be low, the trend was for rising foreign investment into the country. 

Sewell says investment returns in New Zealand are exceeding those in Australia and this was underpinning continued interest in the market.

“New Zealand is attracting enormous interest due to expectations of steady growth, close proximity to Australia, minimal transaction costs and more importantly, the promise of income returns greater than 6%,” Sewell says.

While the rising cost of debt in New Zealand is placing pressure on yields to rise, Sewell says there is still considerable interest from buyers who could source offshore equity and debt at levels that allowed them to compete.