First home buyers have become the busiest group in New Zealand’s housing market, picking up keys at a steady clip while almost everyone else has stepped back. The latest figures from property data firm Cotality, formerly known as CoreLogic, show first home buyers accounted for 27.7 percent of all purchases so far in 2026, up from 25.8 percent over the same stretch last year, and the only major buyer group to grow its numbers while the wider market went quiet.
The numbers come from Cotality’s June Housing Chart Pack, which pulls together sales, values and lending across the country. First home buyers completed 10,025 purchases in the opening months of the year, a rise of 2.4 percent on the same period in 2025. Every other group went backwards. Buyers moving from one home to another were down 11.1 percent, and investors with a mortgage on more than one property fell 5.7 percent.
That makes for an unusual picture. The overall market is slow, yet the people often thought of as the most stretched are the ones keeping the lights on. National sales in May were down 8.3 percent on the same month a year earlier, and over the first five months of 2026 there were 1,775 fewer property transactions than over the same window in 2025, a drop of 4.7 percent.
The reason first home buyers are pushing ahead while others wait comes down to a rare line-up of conditions working in their favour. Property values are well off their highs, there is plenty of stock to choose from, mortgage rates have come down from their peaks, and the deposit hurdle has eased. Values nationally slipped 0.1 percent over the past quarter and 0.6 percent over the year, leaving them around 17 percent below the 2021 peak. For someone trying to buy their first place, falling prices and a long list of homes for sale is a far friendlier backdrop than the frantic bidding of a few years ago.
Cotality chief property economist Kelvin Davidson described the market as sitting in “a neutral or holding pattern”, with “buyers still have plenty of choice and that is helping keep a lid on property values”. Earlier in the year he set out why the moment suits people getting onto the ladder. “With property values off their highs, mortgage rates easing, and support from KiwiSaver and low deposit lending, this group is well placed to take advantage of opportunities,” Davidson said. “For many, the gap between renting and buying has narrowed, making home ownership more achievable.”
KiwiSaver is doing a lot of the heavy lifting on deposits. Glen McLeod, head of mortgage advisers at Link Advisory, told RNZ that most first home buyers are now borrowing with loan to value ratios above 80 percent, meaning they are putting down less than a fifth of the purchase price. “KiwiSaver continues to be the backbone of their deposits, typically contributing around 10 percent to 15 percent,” McLeod said. He added that the KΔinga Ora First Home Loan, which lets eligible buyers in with as little as a 5 percent deposit, “remains a strong option”.
A big part of the shift traces back to the Reserve Bank. Late last year it loosened the limits on how much low-deposit lending banks can write, opening up funding that had been tightly rationed. Mortgage adviser Campbell Hastie put the surge partly down to that change. “I think partly you can probably put it down to the fact that the Reserve Bank opened the valve on that pool of high LVR funding,” Hastie said, describing conditions for first home buyers as “the best they’ve been in some time”.
The trend is strongest in the main centres, where prices fell furthest and have been slowest to recover. First home buyers made up about 31 percent of purchases in Auckland and a striking 39 percent in Wellington, two markets where high prices had locked younger buyers out for years. The pattern is not uniform across the country. Christchurch values rose 3.2 percent over the past year, the standout among the larger cities, while Auckland values were down 2.6 percent.
Whether the window stays open is the live question. ANZ economists now expect the Reserve Bank to lift the official cash rate three times before the end of the year, which would push mortgage rates back up and chip away at what buyers can afford. House prices have been slipping rather than rising, so the calculation for a first home buyer is finely balanced between cheaper homes today and dearer borrowing tomorrow.
For now, the data tells a clear story. While movers sit tight and investors keep their wallets shut, first home buyers are quietly reshaping who owns New Zealand homes, taking advantage of a soft market that has handed them more choice and more room to negotiate than they have had in years. The slowdown that has unsettled sellers has turned out to be exactly the opening a generation of would-be owners was waiting for.
Are you a first home buyer trying to crack the market right now, or holding off until rates settle? Tell us how it is going in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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