Nearly 80 per cent of landlords own one property

New evidence from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment shows the majority of residential landlords own one rental property.

The total number of active landlords with bonds lodged, as of February 9, was 120,330, the ministry said. Of those landlords, the number who lodged one bond, which would generally but not always be for one property, is 93,706. That equates to about 77.9 per cent of the total.

The number of landlords who lodged two to three bonds, which (again) would generally but not always represent two to three properties, was 19,524. That is about 16.2 per cent of the total.

Property accountant Anthony AppletonTattersall, who sought the information, said the response revealed a drop of nearly 2 per cent in investors who owned a single rental, compared with the same data supplied in 2015. But it also showed that landlords with four or more rentals made up less than 6 per cent of the bond lodgement data.

While popular perception had it that all landlords owned multiple properties and reaped big capital gains as a result, the bond data suggested this was not true because, although there were some large landlords, they were not the majority, Appleton-Tattersall said.

The bond data showed the number of landlords who lodged 4-10 bonds was 5037; 698 lodged 11-20; 458 lodged 21-50; 561 lodged 51-200; and 346 lodged more than 200.

This suggested the number of landlords with 50 to 100 properties was about 0.47 per cent, while the number of landlords with more than 200 properties was about 0.29 per cent, AppletonTattersall said. ‘‘Most landlords are very much small-time operators, many of whom have the majority of their life savings in that property.’’

The data also revealed a smaller total number of landlords than in 2015, with a decrease of more than 10,000, or about 8 per cent, he said. ‘‘Given we continue to hear that home ownership rates are dropping, there must be more rental properties, which supports the conclusion that landlords are consolidating their holdings.

‘‘Depending on the quality of the bond data, the drop in landlord numbers could alternatively, or additionally, indicate that more landlords are using a property manager.’’