Nick Goodall

Kia ora and welcome to the New Zealand Property Market Podcast, brought to you by Cotality for the 16th of February, 2026.

I'm unit of research, Nick Goodall, and today I'm joined as per usual by Chief Economist, Kelvin Davidson.

Kelvin, I hope you're surviving the wild weather at the moment, mate.

It's certainly pretty crazy here in Raleigh and was overnight, tying things down and whatnot.

in the middle of the night last night and dealing with children waking up, but hey, we survived and hopefully it's not going to continue for too long.

But let's talk about some work stuff before we maybe catch up about other things about the weekend.

We've got some interesting lending data to get into later, but I really want to get straight into things with

a bit of an OCR and monetary policy statement preview.

So maybe kick us off with a bit of a state of the economy and the things that the Reserve Bank will, of course, be considering, especially given we did get the New Zealand Activity Index data for December last week and also net migration data, which is a pretty important one when it comes to those macroeconomic figures.

So, yeah, take it away, mate.

Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it.

I don't really have too much to add.

I think you covered so much of it off there.

And I think, yeah, it's all about improvement, right?

As long as the economy is improving, as long as we're starting to see increased net migration.

And I take your point that it's absolutely about fewer New Zealanders leaving in particular.

And I think there's been a few other stories and a bit more out there talking about the grass isn't always greener in Australia in terms of

The cost of living over there is still quite high as well.

Yes, probably still a stronger labour market at the moment, but that can't go on forever and it won't be for every industry either.

So for some people, it's not going to quite be as attractive.