Pānui - 27 February 2025 | Toitū Te Whenua - Land Information New Zealand

Published date: 27 Feb 2025
Topic: Overseas investment

Build to Rent legislation passes
Lawyer penalised $275,000 for Overseas Investment Act breaches
Refreshed digital dashboards
Decision summaries – release of withheld information
Recent decision summaries

Kia ora koutou and welcome to our second Pānui of the week!

We were pleased to share further details of planned Overseas Investment Act reforms earlier this week (Pānui - 24 February 2025 special edition) following Associate Finance Minister David Seymour’s announcement on Sunday.

The proposed changes will support Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) to make faster decisions and provide investors with more confidence and certainty in the overseas investment regime.

Read Minister Seymour’s press release

We are looking forward to supporting Ministers and The Treasury as the reforms progress, and will keep you up to date through our website.

Reform of the Overseas Investment Act

This week we also highlight a recent High Court penalty judgment involving a lawyer who admitted breaches of the Overseas Investment Act.

The judgment follows a LINZ investigation that began looking at overseas persons and expanded to include the New Zealand-based lawyer as evidence of breaches to the Act emerged. The lawyer has been ordered to pay $275,000 in penalties, and the case demonstrates the importance of lawyers and advisors having a proper understanding of overseas investment rules.

Read on for updates on Build to Rent legislation and our data dashboards, and for our latest decision summaries.

Ngā mihi

Rebecca McAtamney

Head of Regulatory Practice and Delivery
Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand

Build to Rent legislation passes

Legislation has now been passed amending the Overseas Investment Act 2005 to better enable overseas investors to build or operate existing build-to-rent developments on residential land.

The Overseas Investment (Build-to-rent and Similar Rental Developments) Amendment Bill passed its third reading in Parliament on 20 February. It makes changes intended to encourage investment in New Zealand’s housing sector by providing clarity and certainty to developers that they will be able to build and, when required, sell their build-to-rent assets.

Our investment plan form for residential developments has been updated for the new large rental development pathway.

Application forms and information sheets

Lawyer penalised $275,000 for Overseas Investment Act breaches

Following a LINZ investigation into suspicious forestry transactions, the High Court last week ordered Auckland lawyer Andrew Jarvis to pay $275,000 in penalties for breaches of the Overseas Investment Act relating to advice he gave to overseas investors.

The judgment follows a hearing in October last year where three overseas persons were ordered to pay almost $1.7 million for breaches in the same case.

These penalties reflect the seriousness of the breaches and highlight how important it is that investors seek advice from lawyers who are familiar with the overseas investment rules.

Refreshed digital dashboards

The latest data on approved overseas investment consents is now available on our refreshed interactive dashboards.

The visual dashboards present data up to 31 December 2024, and now contain three full years of decisions going back to January 2022.

The dashboards provide a big-picture view of the decision summaries we publicly release each month and can be filtered according to decision pathways and regions, land area, dollar investment and more.

Our overseas investment dashboards

Decision summaries – release of withheld information

A reminder that confidential information in published decision summaries will be withheld for a set period, and we will advise you of the timeframe and expiry date after your application is approved.

If you have information that has been withheld in your decision summary, you will need to contact us prior to the withholding period expiring if there are grounds that the information should continue to be withheld.

We will not contact you before the withheld information is released at the end of the expiry period.

Decision summaries for February 2025

Decision summaries are published the month after a decision is made. The latest decision summaries are listed here, including standing consent notifications.