If you have spent the last couple of years thinking the property market belonged to everyone except you, the latest numbers are worth a look.
First home buyers accounted for 29% of all property sales in New Zealand, according to property data firm Cotality. That is the highest share ever recorded. Cotality's head of research Nick Goodall put it plainly: "That's a record share."
It is not evenly spread. In Auckland first home buyers made up around 30% of sales. In Wellington it was 37%. In the Hutt Valley it pushed close to 40%. Roughly one in three homes sold in this country is being bought by someone buying their first.
So what changed?
Three things lined up at once
Fewer people competing with you. Overall buyer numbers are down. Investors have been quieter than they were through the 2021 boom. When there are fewer bidders in the room, the buyers who are active get more room to move, and right now a lot of those buyers are first home buyers.
KiwiSaver balances have grown up. In the year to March, more than 50,000 KiwiSaver members withdrew a combined $2.2 billion to buy a first home, according to the Financial Markets Authority's annual KiwiSaver report. The FMA's Emelie Jensert pointed out the obvious reason: people who are now at house buying age have been in the scheme for a long time, so the balances are simply bigger than they used to be.
For a lot of couples, that is the entire deposit problem solved in one line of a bank statement.
The deposit rules loosened. Since 1 December 2025 banks have been able to write up to 25% of their new owner occupier lending to people with less than a 20% deposit, up from 20%. That extra headroom matters. Around half of first home buyers are now getting in with less than a 20% deposit, which would have been much harder to do two years ago.
The part that is getting harder
Here is the balance to all of that good news. The cheap money phase is over.
The Official Cash Rate sits at 2.75% after the Reserve Bank lifted it on 2 September, and the commentary is now about further increases rather than further cuts. The next review is 28 October.
Carded home loan rates have followed. As I write this, the sharpest short term rates sit around 4.79% for six months and around 4.99% for one year, with two and three year rates closer to 5.4%. Floating is sitting above 6%. Those numbers move constantly, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a promise.
What that means in practice is that the ceiling on what you can borrow is being set by servicing, not by your deposit. Banks do not assess you at the rate you are offered. They test you at a considerably higher rate, and on top of that you have debt to income limits, which cap most owner occupiers at six times income. Your KiwiSaver can solve the deposit. It cannot solve the income test.
Meanwhile prices have come off slightly. The national average sat at $894,977 at the end of August, down 1.9% over the previous three months, the largest quarterly fall in two years. ASB's latest housing outlook suggests 2021 peak prices may not return until late 2029.
Read those two facts together and you get the actual picture for 2026. There is less urgency on price than there was, and more urgency on rates.
Five things worth doing before you start looking
1. Check your KiwiSaver eligibility, not just your balance. You generally need to have been contributing for at least three years, you need to be buying your first home, and you have to leave at least $1,000 in the account. If you have been in and out of the scheme, or you have owned property before, it pays to confirm where you stand before you make an offer rather than after.
2. Get your pre-approval sorted first. Low deposit applications are assessed differently to standard ones and they take longer. Banks work to a limited pool for lending above 80%, so timing and presentation genuinely matter. Turning up to an auction with a maybe is not a plan.
3. Understand what a low deposit actually costs. Lending above 80% usually attracts a low equity margin or a one off premium. It is not a reason to avoid buying with 10% or 15%. It is a reason to know the number so it does not surprise you at loan documents stage.
4. Look at the 5% deposit routes. The Kāinga Ora First Home Loan allows a 5% deposit, with income caps of $95,000 for a single buyer with no dependants and $150,000 for two or more buyers combined, or a single buyer with dependants. There is no house price cap. New builds are also treated more generously, with owner occupiers able to go to 90% without eating into the bank's low deposit allowance.
5. Think about your fixed rate structure, not just the headline rate. With the OCR trending up, the cheapest rate on the board today and the right rate for your situation are not always the same thing. Splitting your loan across terms, and matching them to what you expect to happen in your own life, is usually more valuable than chasing five basis points.
The short version
More first home buyers are getting in than at any point on record, deposits are stretching further than they were, and prices have flattened. The trade off is that borrowing costs are heading the other way, so the window is more about serviceability than it is about saving another $10,000.
If you want to know what you can actually borrow in today's market, book a free chat with our team. We compare more than 20 lenders, and there are no fees to you as a client.
This article is general information only and does not take your personal circumstances into account. Journey Mortgages is a trading name of Financial Literacy New Zealand Ltd, FSP1010697. Alex Toohey, FSP739731. Our disclosure statement is available on request and on our website.