All eyes on the new Governor
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So that's a much more encouraging sign. Still a bit of caution, as I say, but it does start to look a little bit better.
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.
What are the current economic indicators in New Zealand?
So, yeah, take it away, mate.
Yeah, I suppose when you look across some of the recent indicators, maybe the last week, it does tend to look a bit more positive. I think there's still reasons for caution. We had that rise in the unemployment rate a couple of weeks back, for example. So there's still a wee bit of caution out there. Some other parts of the economy may be lagging behind just a little bit. Yeah, the most recent data was actually pretty encouraging. So we had the New Zealand Activity Index from Stats New Zealand for December. It was a 1.8% increase in that 12 months to December. When you look across Q4 as a whole, the average increase was about 2.3%. So across October, November, December, each result was actually pretty positive.
Now you can sort of do some fiddling behind the scenes and translate that into a quarterly GDP path for those official benchmark numbers. What that implies is about a 0.6% lift in GDP in the fourth quarter. So, you know, pretty decent result. It would be a slowdown from what we had, barring revisions, it would be a slowdown from what we had in Q3, which was 1.1%. But 0.6%, still pretty solid, you know, annualised pace, what, 2.5%-ish, something like that. So not too bad. Now, it also fits with some other indicators or other predictions for q4 numbers the reserve bank in particular has that kiwi gdp indicator it's sitting at about 0.6 so yeah it looks like looks like we'll have a decent number for q4 gdp which will be out i'm not sure when about another month or something i guess kind of mid to late march
So, yeah, I think you look at that number and you say, you know, recovery's here. It looks like we have two quarters of GDP increase in a row. So that's, you know, a much more encouraging sign. Still a bit of caution, as I say, but it does start to look a little bit better. And then, yeah, net migration turning around as well. So in the year to December, 12 months, adding it up over that 12-month period, rolling total about 14,200, just short of that in terms of net migration into the country in that 12-month period. Still below the average is sort of 30,000, 31,000. So we're still a fair bit below that. But that 14,000 number is the highest we've had for I think about 11 months. So yeah, it does look like it's turning around a little bit.
And a two-way thing as well. It looks like arrivals of non-citizens or basically kind of new migrants to the country that started to pick up. As well as at the same time, New Zealand citizen departures seem to have just slowed a little bit as well. So it's that sort of double whammy thing. And I guess, you know, you always tend to have new migrant arrivals. I suppose the thing that might give people a bit more encouragement is if we see those resident departures slowing down because it's been that big theme for a while of, you know, young New Zealanders heading off overseas.
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Chapters
4 chaptersSpeakers
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