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.
So all the people who caused most of the problems are fleeing to New Zealand.
New Zealanders be warned…
yeah i used to like NZ. good luck y’all
It’s election year. We have never had a 1 term government in my lifetime. They current (right wing) government is not polling as well as you’d expect so here’s hoping for change.
Unfortunately NZ is not immune to the global nazi problem.
I wonder if this is something which really gets a country anything.Those people normally avoid paying taxes, don’t integrate themselves into society and for the most part are terrible people.
Yup and push up land prices and usually take advantage of local resources.
It will bring money to rich assholes running various luxury businesses, and might bring up real estate prices which benefits rich assholes who own a lot of land.
They at least pay taxes while buying. And rich people tend to buy a lot of expensive stuff. So better than nothing?
They can affort do pay someone to figure out how to avoid paying even those taxes.
The billionaires putting me on team Volcano
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.
The average elevation of NZ is nearly 400 meters above sea level. So when the ice all melts and the rest of the world is fucked, the people that caused it will be safe. I know where we should start bombing.
