Lending Rules & Tax

If you're self-employed, lenders don't look at your revenue or what you draw from the business. They start with the net profit in your finalised financial statements, cross-checked against your IRD records, then adjust it. The catch is that the same accounting discipline that keeps your tax bill down also makes your income look smaller to a bank, so a contractor really earning $150,000 can appear to earn $90,000 on paper. Add-backs recover some of that, but different lenders

A mortgage decline feels like a verdict. It usually isn't. The most damaging thing you can do in the first two weeks is panic and apply somewhere else, because every fresh application logs a credit enquiry that stays on your file for five years, and a cluster of them actually lowers your score. Your credit file records that a lender enquired, not that you were declined. So the first move is to stop, get your free credit reports, and find out what actually happened.

TL;DR Capital gains tax is no longer a hypothetical. Labour is campaigning on a flat 28% CGT on residential investment and commercial property, applying only to gains made after 1 July 2027, with the family home and farms excluded. The Greens go further with a wealth tax and an inheritance-style tax. National, ACT and New Zealand First oppose new capital taxes. The election is on 7 November 2026. Whether any of this happens depends on the result and the coalition that follows

TL;DR Standard residential rental is exempt from GST. You don't charge it, you don't claim it. But the moment you move into development, building to sell, subdividing, doing it repeatedly, you can cross into a taxable activity, and GST changes everything. This post explains where the line sits, what crossing it means, and why getting GST wrong on a development can wipe out the profit. GST is the tax that catches investors moving into development off guard. Residential rental

TL;DR From 1 December 2025, the rules on pets in rentals changed. Tenants can request a pet, landlords can only refuse on reasonable grounds, and landlords can now charge a pet bond of up to two weeks rent on top of the standard bond. Most coverage framed this as a loss of landlord control. The smarter read: pet-friendly properties lease faster, hold tenants longer, and can command stronger rent in a market with a lot of pet-owning renters. This post covers the rules and the

TL;DR The main home exclusion keeps your family home outside the bright-line test. Simple in theory. The traps appear when the home isn't purely a home: a room rented out, a home office claimed, short-stay accommodation, or a period where the property was rented before you moved in. In those cases the exclusion can be partial or lost entirely. This post explains how the exclusion works and where mixed-use blurs the line in ways that cost people at sale. Most people assume the

TL;DR The Resource Management Act is being replaced. Two new laws, a Planning Act and a Natural Environment Act, are working through Parliament with a transition running to 2029. The headline for investors: consents are projected to drop by 40 to 50%, the number of zones collapses dramatically, and the whole system reorients around property rights and development. For anyone holding land with development potential, this changes the calculation. This post explains what's comin

TL;DR Interest deductibility is back to 100% from 1 April 2025. Most investors know the headline. Fewer have actually checked their own returns to confirm they're claiming the full amount. The phase-out years were messy, accounting systems carried partial-deductibility settings, and errors are sitting in plenty of 2025 and 2026 returns. This is a straight guide to auditing your position so you're claiming everything you're entitled to, and understanding what the change does t

TL;DR The compliance deadline passed on 1 July 2025. There's no grace period anymore. Every private rental in New Zealand must meet the five Healthy Homes Standards from day one of any new or renewed tenancy. Penalties are up to $7,200 per breach. Most landlords think they're compliant because something was done in 2023. Many aren't. This post is a straight checklist on the five standards, the documentation gap that's catching landlords at Tribunal, and why this is asset prot

TL;DR The bright-line period dropped from 10 years to 2 years for residential property sold on or after 1 July 2024. That single change reset the strategic calculation for every investor sitting on an underperforming asset. This isn't an invitation to flip. It's a clean window to exit positions that aren't working and redeploy capital into ones that are. If you bought before mid-2022, you're already outside the period. If you bought after, the date is known. The rebalance is

TL;DR The Reserve Bank eased LVR settings in December 2025. It also has DTI restrictions baked into the system since July 2024. Most investors hear "rules eased" and assume borrowing capacity went up. It didn't, not in any meaningful way. LVR controls the deposit you need to get in the door. DTI controls how much you can actually borrow against your income. They work together, and DTI is now the tighter ceiling. If your income doesn't scale, no LVR change will save you. This