Two water findings, and why they are not the same problem

What you are looking at

Everything below is generated the same way it is for any address you search: PropertyKete matches the address to its parcel in Land Information New Zealand data, then checks that parcel against council and government hazard, planning, school and neighbourhood datasets. The findings, the source names and the dataset dates are live. What is added here — and only here — is the commentary between the sections, explaining what each finding means and, just as importantly, what it does not.

We picked a civic property deliberately. Everything on this page is public record, and the site will produce the same report for any address on request, but publishing and promoting a page about somebody’s home is a different act from a person looking up an address themselves. So the worked examples are council, community and commercial sites.

This one is here because it shows something a single-hazard example cannot: two findings from the same broad category — water — that a careful buyer would act on at different speeds and with different people.

How to read a hazard finding

Every finding on a PropertyKete report carries four things a reader needs in order to weigh it: what was checked, what the result was, which dataset it came from and when that dataset was current, and what to do about it. The last one matters more than people expect. "Flood plain: detected" on its own is anxiety; "flood plain: detected, request a LIM and ask your insurer about cover and excess before you go unconditional" is a task with an owner and a deadline.

Findings also carry an evidence type. A material finding is direct, parcel-level evidence: this property intersects this mapped extent. A screening indicator is a broad regional or probabilistic layer — useful for deciding whether to look harder, not a determination about the site. A context finding is neither a risk nor a reassurance; it is background, like which council you deal with. The report gives these different visual weight, and so should you.

One more thing before the findings. The number of checks a report runs is not the number of hazards that could exist. It is the number of datasets we hold for that address. Those are very different statements, and conflating them is the single easiest way to misread any property report — this one included.

The hazard checks

Here are the hazard findings exactly as they appear on the live report for this address. Two are detected. Read them, then come back for what they mean in practice.

The two detected findings are both about water, and they are not the same kind of problem.

The flood plain finding means part of the parcel falls inside Auckland Council’s modelled 1% AEP flood extent. "1% AEP" means a 1% chance in any given year — not "once a century". Those sound alike and are not: over a 30-year mortgage, a 1% annual chance compounds to roughly a one-in-four chance of at least one such event. The modelling also includes an allowance for climate change, so it is a forward-looking figure rather than a record of what has happened. It is modelled at catchment scale, which means it is reliable about the catchment and approximate about any individual boundary line.

What a buyer does with that: request a LIM, read the flood report for the catchment, and talk to an insurer about both availability and excess before going unconditional. Insurers price flood exposure, and finding out after you are committed is the expensive way to learn it. This is why the report marks it as something to complete before unconditional rather than a general heads-up.

The overland flow path finding is different in kind. An overland flow path is the route surface water takes across a site during heavy rain — mapped from LiDAR elevation data rather than hydraulic modelling. It is not a flood extent, and a property with one is not "flooding". What it does affect is building: Auckland Council uses these paths to set setbacks and to assess consent applications, so a flow path crossing a building footprint or a proposed driveway is a design constraint, and one that can be expensive to discover late.

That difference in kind is why the two findings carry different urgency in the report. The flood plain finding bears on whether you can insure and afford the property as it stands. The flow path finding bears on what you could do to it later. Both are real; only one of them is likely to change an offer.

Note also what the source lines under each finding tell you. Both come from Auckland Council, both carry the date the dataset was current, and the overland flow path finding says in plain terms that it was identified using GIS techniques rather than hydraulic modelling. That is a limitation the council states about its own data, and we pass it on rather than smoothing it away.

Planning

Planning findings describe the rules that apply to the land, not its condition. On this property the zone is the main thing to note.

The zone name here comes from Auckland Council’s own coded-value list, and the report states the planning status of the specific mapped feature rather than assuming everything in the layer is in force. That distinction is not pedantry: the Unitary Plan is operative in part, and appeals and plan changes move zone boundaries and rules between our data refreshes.

A zone tells you what category of activity the plan contemplates for the land. It does not tell you what you could get consented, and PropertyKete never claims it does. Development capacity depends on overlays, controls, designations, infrastructure, and the specific proposal — questions for a resource-management planner reading the rules against your actual plans, with a LIM in hand.

Schools

School findings are context, not risk. The report separates schools this address is in zone for from schools that are merely nearby, because the two mean quite different things to a family.

In-zone means the address falls inside a school’s enrolment scheme boundary as published by the Ministry of Education. Nearby means exactly that and nothing more — proximity is not entitlement, and a listing that says "close to" a school is not telling you your child can attend it.

Zone boundaries also move. Schools review enrolment schemes, and a boundary that includes an address today may not next year. If a specific school is part of why you are buying, confirm the address with that school directly rather than relying on any map, ours included.

Neighbourhood

Neighbourhood findings describe the surrounding statistical area, not the property. The report labels them as area-level data for that reason.

Deprivation and census measures describe the population of a statistical area — thousands of people across many properties. They say nothing about any individual address or the people at it, and reading them as if they did is both wrong and unkind. Stats NZ also randomly rounds published counts to protect confidentiality, and suppresses figures for very small areas.

Treated properly, area data answers a narrow and genuinely useful question: what is the wider context this property sits in? Treated improperly, it becomes a proxy for judgements it cannot support.

Where every finding came from

Each finding above cites its dataset and, where we hold one, the date that dataset was current. These are the sources behind this report:

• Auckland Council — Coastal Inundation (1% AEP)
• Auckland Council — Coastal Inundation (1% AEP +1m SLR)
• Auckland Council — Flood Plains
• Akl Landslide Susceptibility Large Scale
• Akl Landslide Susceptibility Shallow
• Auckland Council — Overland Flow Paths
• Akl Unitary Plan Zones
• GNS Science — Active Faults (NZAFD-AF250)
• MBIE Tenancy Services — Rental Bond Data
• Ministry of Education — Enrolment Zones
• OpenStreetMap — Amenities
• OpenStreetMap — Transport Stops
• University of Otago — NZDep2023
• Stats Nz Ta 2025 Clipped

Every dataset PropertyKete uses — with its owner, licence, refresh schedule and coverage — is published in full, and what guides the build explains why missing data is reported as missing rather than treated as a clear result.

Guides that draw on this report

Each of these guides uses this report to illustrate a point, and explains the finding in more depth than a worked example can.

• How to research a property before buying in New Zealand
• Reading flood risk on a New Zealand property report
• Overland flow paths: what they mean for an Auckland property
• What a LIM tells you — and what it doesn’t

All guides →

The point of this example is not this property. It is that a report which names its sources, dates its data, separates material findings from screening indicators, and says plainly what it did not check is a report you can actually act on — including by deciding it has told you enough to walk away, or enough to keep going.

Every address in New Zealand has a report like this one. The coverage differs: council hazard data is deepest in Auckland, and outside it the same report runs fewer checks and says so rather than returning a clean-looking page.