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Wealthy Americans are dominating applications for New Zealand’s “golden visa”, driven by a love for the country’s natural beauty and entrepreneurial spirit, as well a desire to escape Trump’s administration.
New rules for the Active Investor Plus visa came into effect in April 2025, lowering investment thresholds, removing English-language requirements and cutting the amount of time applicants must spend in the country to establish residency from three years to three weeks. Successful applicants can only purchase homes in New Zealand worth more than $5m.
Immigration New Zealand said the new scheme offering residency to wealthy foreigners has attracted 573 applications, representing 1,833 people. Before the changes, the visa attracted 116 applications over two-and-a-half years.
How many homes in New Zealand are worth more than $5,000,000?
NZ$5m is not that high. Auckland’s median house price hit $1m recently, $5m is not a stretch for an expensive inner city or beachside suburb. Queenstown average is $1.6m. Building costs in NZ are very high because most materials need to be imported, and property values keep growing for a complicated mix of reasons - immigration, neoliberal policies, etc.
Your two examples are less than a third of the way to the requirement. Some digging through NZ real estate stats and it looks like $5m+ homes make up about 0.5% of New Zealands housing stock. That’s about 7000 homes.
That’s one way to cap your golden visas.