The trader betting on rising house prices

When Gary Stevenson stepped off the plane for his first ever New Zealand tour earlier this month, he brought a message that cuts across both left and right: house prices will keep rising, because wealth inequality makes it inevitable. The former Citibank trader-turned-YouTube economist, known to his two million subscribers as Gary’s Economics, packed out the Bruce Mason Centre in Auckland on 4 March 2026, making the case that the forces driving asset inflation globally are far from spent. 

It’s a bold claim to make in a country where house prices have gone essentially nowhere for three years. But Stevenson’s track record is hard to dismiss. 

The man who called it 

Stevenson made his name at Citibank by correctly predicting that the 2008 financial crisis would create lasting, structural inequality and then betting on it. In June 2020, he publicly predicted a massive cost-of-living crisis, surging gold and share prices, and a housing crunch. Most of that has since come to pass. 

His theory, laid out in his bestselling memoir The Trading Game, argues that when wealth concentrates at the top, rich people have nowhere to put their money except assets. That demand is structural, not cyclical, and it doesn’t stop when central banks raise rates or governments talk about supply. 

“I still think long run the big picture is increases in asset price rises,” Stevenson told the Herald Now Business programme during his visit. “I believe that that will continue because of continuing increases in wealth inequality. If you shift power away from working people towards the very rich, that can only mean incredibly expensive assets, because at the end of the day, what do rich people buy? Assets.” 

The corporate landlord warning 

Stevenson’s most pointed observation for New Zealand is what happens if house prices don’t rise. Rather than delivering affordable housing, he argues that flat prices simply open the door for corporate landlords to move in – precisely the dynamic already playing out in the US, where institutional investors like Blackstone have become major residential landlords. 

“I don’t see how stocks in particular can become more and more expensive while house prices fall,” he argued. “Rich people are going to diversify. And what you’re going to see if those house prices don’t start to rise… is that corporations fill that gap. Corporations come in, they raise the money from the rich, and they start becoming massive landlords. What that means is more ordinary people renting from corporations.” 

It’s not a purely theoretical concern. New Zealand has already defined build-to-rent as a separate asset class since 2022, and The Spinoff has reported that institutional investors, including sovereign wealth funds and iwi, are actively moving into the sector. Critics have warned that corporate landlords, as American research has shown, tend to prioritise short-term profits over tenant welfare. 

Wealth concentration is already stark. According to the 2025 NZ Rich List data, just 119 individuals and families control $102.1 billion in assets – equivalent to 4.9% of total household net wealth in New Zealand. 

What the local numbers show 

Whatever the long-run structural forces, New Zealand’s housing market right now is in a very different place. The REINZ House Price Index for January 2026 showed national values down 0.7% year-on-year, with Auckland off 2.6%, making it three years of essentially flat-to-falling prices in real terms. 

The RBNZ’s November 2025 Monetary Policy Statement described house prices as having “remained stable,” despite lower mortgage rates and improving activity, and forecast only “moderate” growth over the projection period. The Reserve Bank is picking around 3.75% growth in the year to December 2026 – modest by historical standards. 

The major banks are similarly restrained. ANZ has revised its 2026 house price forecast down to 2% – cut from 5% – citing expectations that OCR hikes could arrive as early as December 2026, shifting mortgage rates from a tailwind to a headwind. BNZ sits at around 2.1%, ASB at 3.8%, and Westpac at 5.4%, per Opes Partners’ bank forecast tracker. Cotality (formerly CoreLogic NZ) has flagged a potential 5% rise, but conditions this on lower rates and a firmer macro backdrop. 

A critical note: bank economists predicted 7–10% growth for 2025. The actual result was flat-to-1.4% nationally. As MoneyHub NZ points out, the pattern of systematic over-optimism from those with a commercial interest in rising prices is worth bearing in mind when reading any forecast. 

The headwinds are real 

New Zealand’s housing market faces genuine structural challenges that Stevenson’s global thesis doesn’t fully capture. Inventory is at 10-year highs, net migration has retreated sharply from its 2023 peak, and debt-to-income (DTI) limits now constrain how much buyers can borrow regardless of where interest rates sit. 

Building consents have also staged a recovery: Stats NZ recorded 3,747 new dwellings consented in September 2025, up 27% year-on-year, adding to near-term supply. Auckland and Wellington remain well below their 2021 peaks, with some analysts not expecting Auckland to return to those levels until 2028. 

Regional divergence is significant. While Auckland has continued to lag, Canterbury, Southland, and parts of the South Island have shown meaningful gains. The NZ housing story is not one market. 

Two views, one long run 

Stevenson and New Zealand’s mainstream economists are not necessarily arguing about different things, rather, they’re arguing about different timeframes. Local bank economists and the RBNZ are analysing 2026’s specific supply, demand, and rate dynamics. Stevenson is making a decade-long structural argument about wealth concentration. 

Both can be right simultaneously. Property could remain flat or grind modestly higher through 2026 while the underlying conditions for eventual, more substantial price rises build in the background. Investors who have lived through multiple NZ property cycles will recognise the pattern: a prolonged period of frustration followed by a move that catches most people off-guard. 

What’s less certain is Stevenson’s implicit suggestion that New Zealand’s inequality dynamics directly mirror the US and UK. New Zealand does have the DTI restrictions, the supply pipeline, and the policy environment those markets largely lack. Whether that meaningfully delays, or merely postpones, the kind of asset-price escalation Stevenson has built a career betting on remains the central question for NZ property investors. 

We’re not economists, but we do have a good handle on property market sentiment. Call the Goodwins team on 0800 GOODWINS to make sense of the market today.