FEATURES • PROPERTY NEWS
Political property promises Recent months may have seen the return of Covid-19 and lockdown 2.0 but, for many involved in the property game, it’s news of election promises which have been of most interest. BY MIRIAM BELL
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t’s been all about political promises on the property front in recent weeks. That’s because the long, drawn-out election 2020 campaign has been winding up in intensity as D-day approaches. And that means thorny issues around housing, and the different ideological approaches to dealing with them, have re-emerged. National was the last of the main parties to release its housing policy, but it includes elements with a lot of appeal to landlords. Along with scrapping the Resource Management Act (RMA) and building more housing, the party is pledging to fix New Zealand’s broken rental market.
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The party’s housing spokesperson Jacqui Dean says they would do this by simplifying recently introduced unwieldy rental regulations so that it is easier for landlords to comply. That would involve removing ring-fencing of rental losses for tax purposes, cutting the bright-line test from five years back to two years, and repealing the Residential Tenancies Amendment Act. While the party does support the Healthy Homes standards, which aim to ensure everyone has a warm, dry home, it would simplify the requirements to make it clearer and simpler for landlords to comply. “This will stop good landlords from fleeing the market due to cost, bringing down the cost of rents and ensuring there are enough rental properties on the market to meet demand.” In contrast, the Labour Party’s housing policy – which also has a heavy focus on increasing housing supply and repealing the RMA – intends to build on the policies they implemented in their first term. Those policies include their tenancy law reforms, the Healthy Homes standards and tax changes. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says they firmly believe that all New Zealanders have the right to live in warm, dry, healthy homes, whether they rent or own their homes. “We will continue to ensure tenants and landlords have a fair deal by regulating property managers, following our work setting basic health standards for rental properties.” To that end, if re-elected, Labour would introduce the regulation of property management services to ensure they meet professional standards and a Code of Conduct. This is something that
multiple groups, including Consumer NZ, REINZ and the Property Council, have been calling for for years. Meanwhile, the Green Party – which has a detailed “Homes For All” policy – have announced some policies that are not at all appealing to many landlords. So they want to “make renting fairer” by requiring landlords to be registered with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development and by extending the current regulatory framework for real estate agents to include property managers. They also want to introduce a Warrant of Fitness (WOF) for rental properties as an enforcement mechanism. This would require all rental properties to be independently assessed for compliance with the Healthy Homes standards.
Back or scrap Reactions to the various policy announcements have been mixed, with some property industry and housing groups welcoming aspects of some policies and others taking different views. For example, National’s plans to roll back the government’s new Healthy Homes standards and tenancy law reforms prompted Barfoot & Thompson to co-sign a letter with a wide range of organisations calling for them to rethink that policy. In the letter, the signatories say that backing the standards would ensure more New Zealanders live in warm, dry, healthier homes – and that would save the economy millions every year. “Scrapping the Healthy Homes standards would leave Kiwi taxpayers to otherwise pick up this multi-million-dollar bill.”
