Assessing housing shortages in New Zealand

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, strong migration-led population growth boosted demand in New Zealand, including for housing. With housing construction slow to respond, the limited supply of new housing moving onto the market exacerbated the housing shortage.

We constructed a simple model to estimate housing shortages across New Zealand’s regions. It builds on a similar approach used in our work for clients, and ANZ’s recent analysis, in which we break down the specific drivers of demand for and supply of new housing relative to a range of base years.