Nick Goodall

Happy International Women's Day for 2026.

Mā te wā.

They've definitely stayed quite balanced on this.

They're showing some patience with wanting to see how things do eventuate.

Kia ora and welcome to a special reactionary episode of the New Zealand Property Market Podcast brought to you by Cotaldi on the 18th of February 2026.

I'm Head of Research Nick Goodall and I'm joined as per usual by Chief Economist Calvin Davidson.

Calvin, certainly no surprise with the official cash rate on hold at 2.25% but of course it was the first statement underneath for the Reserve Bank, underneath the watch ship of Anna Bremen, the new Governor.

What did you learn mate?

Yeah, I think it's an interesting one.

But the words I think of are balanced, as you say, but everyone would have been wondering how they're going to react to the last few months of data.

And we've talked about in the last few weeks that every time a new data release comes out, there's two ways to read it all the time, whether it's the disappointing unemployment figures, which you can read in two ways once you get below the details, the CPI, of course, going above band, but like you said, expectation of that still to drop down.

And when everyone talks about core inflation,

in terms of that medium-term inflation as well.

There's nothing to panic there.

So yeah, I think you could read all those things sort of two ways.

They've definitely stayed quite balanced on this.

They're showing some patience with wanting to see how things do eventuate.

I think it's an interesting time, right?

Like really hard to compare November to February.

A lot happens in that time, but you don't necessarily get enough data