The Data

Rental data is sourced from the Ministry of Building, Innovation and Employment (formerly the Department of Building and Housing) based on rental bonds lodged. This rental data is supplied to us, grouped into geographic areas based on statistical area units used by Statistics NZ for the census, and as a result do not always match well with common usage suburb names.

The rental data for each area is matched to house price information from our database to determine property prices and therefore yield. The yield is calculated as the annualised rental income divided by the median house value calculated using our E-valuer.

Market Composition

The Queenstown Lakes rental property market is dominated by houses, with a spread of flats and apartments around the district. Of the 376 properties on the market, 268 (71%) are houses, with 65 apartments (17%), and 43 flats (11%).

The biggest market in terms of rental houses is Queenstown/Frankton/ Arrowtown, with 149 properties. Wanaka has 110 rental houses on the market, and Queenstown Central only nine.

However, in Queenstown Central, there are no other rental property types actually available (i.e. houses represent 100% of the market). Houses in Wanaka account for 92% of the market, and it’s 60% in Queenstown/Frankton/Arrowtown.

Along with Queenstown Central, Wanaka doesn’t have any apartments on the market either, but it does have nine flats (8% of its rental market). The only rental apartments are in Queenstown/ Frankton/Arrowtown (65, or 26% of its market), and it also has the most flats (34, or 14% of its market).

House Size, By Bedroom Count

Of the 268 rental houses in Queenstown Lakes, only 3% (nine properties, all in Queenstown/Frankton/Arrowtown) have five bedrooms, and 2% (five properties, all in Wanaka) have one bedroom. There are 15% of rental houses in the two-bedroom bracket, spread across Queenstown/Frankton/Arrowtown and Wanaka, and 24% in the four-bedroom bracket (again, spread across Queenstown/Frankton/Arrowtown and Wanaka).

So this means that the bulk of rental houses on the market in Queenstown Lakes are three-bedroom, which is 150 properties, or 56% of all rental houses. It’s very common across the country for most of the rental house stock to be in the three-bedroom bracket.

Queenstown/Frankton/Arrowtown has 81 of the three-bedroom rental houses, and 60 are in Wanaka. Queenstown Central has nine (so this means that all rental properties on the market in this area are three-bedroom houses).

Rent And Yield

By matching average value to rent we can look at gross yield for three-bedroom houses in each area. Median weekly rents for three-bedroom rental houses are similar in Queenstown/Frankton/Arrowtown and Queenstown Central, at $775 and $750 per week, respectively. Wanaka is quite a bit cheaper, at $582 per week.

Median values for those properties don’t vary quite so much, with Queenstown/Frankton/Arrowtown at $1.17million and Wanaka back down at $955,000. This means a reasonably tight range for gross rental yields too on three-bedroom houses, with Wanaka actually the lowest (3.2%) and Queenstown Central the highest (3.5%).

That yield in Queenstown Central would have been higher still, had it not been for a drop in rents over the past year of 6.3%. By contrast, rents have risen strongly in Wanaka and Queenstown/Frankton/Arrowtown.