Stuart Mitchell

Hence the reason, like I say, a lot of builders are moving down here for work.

Yeah, well, my partner's one of the owners of White Fox here in Queenstown, Wanaka, so obviously she touches on that with me, and yeah, it is raised, and it's definitely, I guess the property's worth four and a half, it's probably going to be selling for five now.

So, but me personally, I can't speak, I'm not getting people looking to buy five million plus coming to me to borrow money at the moment, and some of those, they're probably very high net worth, obviously, and they might have used money from overseas, so

I can't give you data on what I'm seeing at the cold face from my perspective as a lender.

But what I can tell you is that down from that, and I'm looking at probably 2024 and 2025, I have all my clients and what were they doing?

Less than 1% were overseas investors in 2024.

We're now up at just over 7%.

And probably the volume of business we've done over that time has increased by 40%.

So basically overseas investors are definitely back.

But one of the reasons I'm seeing it is obviously the exchange rate.

Bright line tax after two years doesn't exist.

And again, relatively, when you're coming from Singapore, because it's Singaporeans and Australians that we're dealing with, relatively speaking, look what you're getting here versus over in Sydney, Melbourne or Singapore.

So it's very well priced and again, a good deal on the exchange rate.

So this literally 7% I'm talking about would have been in the last eight weeks.

Literally.

It would have been at less than 1% before then.

So I see a big shift in overseas.

And before the Reserve Bank brought all these rules in to stop overseas or restrict them from purchasing...

I'd have 15% investors, 15% overseas, always, like clockwork.

It disappeared for years, almost zero.