Guide

How to research a property before buying in New Zealand

You are thinking about buying a property. This is what to check, roughly in what order, and who carries responsibility for each answer. It is organised around the decisions you make — not around the datasets anyone happens to hold, ours included.

Stage 1

Before you get serious about a property

Is this property, and this street, worth any more of my time?

You have spent nothing and committed to nothing, which makes this the cheapest place in the process to find a reason to stop. The work here is screening: gathering enough public information to decide whether this property earns a Saturday, a building inspector, and eventually a few thousand dollars of professional fees. Screening is not verification — everything you find here is a lead to follow, not a fact you can rely on.

Worth doing before you view

Find out which council the property is in. That single fact determines which district or unitary plan applies, which hazard maps exist, whose LIM you would order, and who processes consents.
Look at the council’s own hazard viewer and planning maps for the address. Councils publish these free, and they are the authoritative version of anything a third-party site shows you — including us.
Read the listing sceptically. It describes the property as the seller would like it understood, and words like “potential”, “scope to add” and “as is, where is” are questions rather than features.
If a school matters to you, confirm the address with the school itself. Enrolment zones move, and being near a school is not the same as being entitled to attend it.
Walk or drive the street at a different time and day from the open home. Traffic, noise, parking and light are things no dataset will tell you and half an hour will.
Note the age of the house. Construction era drives later questions — weathertightness, cladding, insulation, wiring, and whether alterations were consented.

The distinction that costs people the most money

There are three different things that can look identical on any property report, ours included: a check that ran and found nothing at this address, a check that exists but has no data covering this area, and a check that is never run at all. Only the first one is a result.

A short report is not the same as a short list of risks. If you take one habit from this guide, make it this: before you read what a report found, find out what it looked for.

Be honest about what desk research can settle. Hazard exposure, planning constraints and neighbourhood context are public-record questions, and screening handles them well. Condition, workmanship, legal interests on the title, and whether the seller has told you everything are not — those are the next three stages.

Stage 2

Before making an offer

What do I need to know before I sign something binding, and what should my offer be conditional on?

A signed sale and purchase agreement is a contract. The conditions that protect you have to be written into it before it is signed — you cannot add them afterwards because something turned up. So the work at this stage is deciding which conditions you need, which means knowing which questions are still open.

Auction changes the order of everything

A successful auction bid is unconditional the moment the hammer falls. There is no building-report condition, no finance condition and no due-diligence period unless the vendor has agreed to one in advance.

If the property is going to auction, every stage of this guide has to be completed beforehand — and you have to be willing to spend money on inspections and legal review for a property you may not win. That is the cost of the format, worth planning for rather than discovering on the day.

Get these moving now, not later

Engage a solicitor or conveyancer before you sign anything. Ask them to review the agreement, including the conditions and the dates on them. This is the cheapest legal advice you will ever buy relative to what it protects.
Ask the agent for the Record of Title, any LIM already obtained, and the property file. Vendors often hold some of these; when they do not, you can order them yourself.
Order a LIM from the council if there is not a current one. It is the council’s formal statement of what it knows about the property — recorded hazards, consents, notices, drainage, rates and special land features — and it takes time to come back, so order early.
Talk to your insurer about this specific address, not about insurance in general. For properties with recorded flood, coastal or land-stability exposure, availability, excess and premium can all differ from what you assumed — and lenders generally require insurance to be in place.
Confirm your lending position. A bank’s appetite is affected by the property as well as by you — unusual titles, unconsented work, or exposure a valuer flags.
Check the ownership structure. Unit title, cross-lease and leasehold all carry obligations and risks that freehold does not, and each one changes what your solicitor needs to review.

Screening tools earn their keep here. Their job is not to answer these questions but to tell you which are live for this property, so the conditions you write are the right ones. A modelled flood extent is not proof that a property floods; it is an excellent reason to make your offer conditional on insurance confirmation and to read the LIM’s flooding section closely.

Stage 3

Before going unconditional

Has everything I assumed actually been verified by someone who carries responsibility for the answer?

This is the decision point. Up to here you have options; after here you have obligations. This stage turns assumptions into confirmed answers from people accountable for them, while you can still walk away or renegotiate at little or no cost.

The standard set

Building inspection by a qualified inspector, ideally one you engaged rather than one the vendor supplied. Read the whole report, including the parts written up as minor, and ask the inspector what worried them most.
Solicitor’s review of the Record of Title and every interest registered on it — easements, covenants, encumbrances, cross-lease flats plans. Registered interests bind you as the new owner, and are among the most common sources of an unwelcome surprise.
LIM read in full, with your solicitor — recorded hazards, consents issued, whether code compliance certificates followed, notices, drainage and land features.
Property file from the council if the LIM raises questions. It holds the underlying documents — plans, inspection records, correspondence — that the LIM only summarises.
Insurance confirmed in writing for this address, not indicatively. Cover available at a materially higher excess or premium is information you need before you commit, not after.
A geotechnical or structural engineer where slope, ground conditions, retaining walls, subsidence, or any hazard finding touching land stability is in play. A building inspector assesses the building; an engineer can investigate the ground beneath it.
Unit title records if the property is a unit title — the body corporate’s long-term maintenance plan, levies, minutes and disclosure statements. These reveal costs and disputes no inspection of your own unit will show.
Confirmation that alterations were consented and signed off. Unconsented or uncertified work becomes your problem on settlement, and can affect both insurance and resale.

What the most urgent tier on a PropertyKete report means

Findings on a PropertyKete report carry a practical next step and a sense of when it matters. The most urgent tier maps to exactly this stage: it means the finding could change whether, or on what terms, you want to proceed — typically because it touches insurability, consenting or ground conditions.

That tier is a prompt to get a professional answer. It is never itself the answer, and a report that raises it has not assessed the property — it has told you who can.

One discipline is worth adopting here: write down every open question and name the person responsible for closing it. Questions without an owner are the ones that survive to settlement.

Stage 4

Before settlement

Is the property in the same condition and legal state I agreed to buy?

The contract is now binding, but the transaction is not finished. Most of this stage is your solicitor’s work; the parts that are yours are worth doing properly, because they are your last practical chance to raise an issue.

Do the pre-settlement inspection carefully. You are checking that the property is in the condition it was in when you agreed to buy it, that anything the vendor agreed to fix has been fixed, and that included chattels are present and working.
Check the chattels against the list in the agreement, item by item. These disputes are avoidable, and a list in hand prevents them.
Confirm your insurance is in place effective from the date the agreement requires — commonly settlement, but read the clause. Your lender will generally require evidence of it.
Let your solicitor handle the settlement statement, rates and any apportionments, and confirm the title transfer and any outstanding requisitions are resolved.
Raise anything you find at the pre-settlement inspection immediately, through your solicitor, before settlement occurs. After settlement your options narrow considerably.

If something significant has changed — damage, removed chattels, work started without consent — do not settle first and argue later. Your solicitor has remedies before settlement that are much harder to use afterwards.

What PropertyKete can help screen

PropertyKete is designed to help with early property research, particularly before you make an offer or decide what needs deeper investigation. It brings public hazard, planning, school and neighbourhood data together for an address, explains in plain English what each result means, names the dataset and its date, and points you at the person who can answer the question properly. That is screening: it tells you what to ask, of whom, and by when.

The list below is generated from the same coverage registry the city pages use, so it describes what the product does today. Coverage is currently deepest in Auckland, because PropertyKete holds more Auckland-specific hazard and planning datasets than it does for anywhere else.

Each finding carries an evidence type, and it changes how much weight the finding deserves. Material evidence is a direct, parcel-level result — this property intersects this mapped extent. A screening indicator is a broad regional or probabilistic layer, useful for deciding whether to look harder rather than as a determination about the site. Contextual information is neither a concern nor a reassurance: which council you deal with, or which base zone the land sits in.

Checks PropertyKete runs, and the cities each one returns a result in
Check	Where it returns a result	Source
Flood plain (1% AEP)Tests whether any part of the parcel intersects the modelled 1% annual-exceedance-probability flood plain. Being inside it does not mean the house has flooded or will; being outside it does not mean water has never reached the property.	Auckland	Auckland Council (dataset updated January 2025)
Overland flow pathModelled routes surface water takes in heavy rain. A flow path crossing a section constrains where you can build more often than it floods a house.	Auckland	Auckland Council (dataset updated January 2025)
Coastal inundation (1% AEP, current sea level)Modelled coastal flooding at today’s sea level, for the Auckland coastal region.	Auckland	Auckland Council (January 2025)
Coastal inundation (1% AEP, +1 m sea-level rise)The same modelling under one metre of sea-level rise. It is a scenario, not a forecast, and it carries no date by which that rise occurs.	Auckland	Auckland Council (January 2025)
Shallow landslide susceptibilityA regional susceptibility model. Moderate results are shown as screening indicators with reduced weight; high and very high are treated as material. Susceptibility describes ground conditions across an area — it is not a prediction about one slope.	Auckland	Auckland Council technical report TR2025/7 (May 2025)
Large-scale landslide susceptibilityThe same modelling for larger, deeper failures, with the same screening and material split.	Auckland	Auckland Council technical report TR2025/7 (May 2025)
Active fault proximityRuns for every New Zealand address and is always shown in the free preview. It reports whether a mapped active fault trace lies within 500 metres, from GNS Science mapping compiled at 1:250,000 — a national screening scale, not a site survey. It does not give a distance in metres, because the dataset is not precise enough to place a fault within an individual property.	Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch	GNS Science, New Zealand Active Faults Database (NZAFD-AF250)
Local authorityNames the council responsible for consents, the district plan and property records. This is context, not a risk finding — it is never treated as a concern.	Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch	Stats NZ territorial authority boundaries (TA2025)
Zoning and planning overlaysReturns the Auckland Unitary Plan base zone containing the parcel, and checks five overlay types: Special Character, Historic Heritage, Significant Ecological Areas, Notable Trees, and Sites and Places of Significance to Mana Whenua. The base zone is context; a constraining overlay is flagged as something to resolve before going unconditional. It never tells you what you may build — that is the council’s call.	Auckland	Auckland Unitary Plan
School enrolment zonesChecks which enrolment zones the address falls inside, and lists schools within 5 km that it is outside. Schools are not a risk check — in-zone results are shown expanded, nearby out-of-zone schools collapsed. Zones change; the school is the authority on its own zone.	Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch	Ministry of Education (2025)
Area deprivation (NZDep2023)An area-level measure for the statistical area around the address, not a measure of the property or the people in it. Around 400 of New Zealand’s 32,817 SA1 areas have no published decile; those render as unavailable rather than as a good score.	Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch	University of Otago / Stats NZ 2023 Census
Nearby amenitiesA walkability proxy across eight daily-needs categories. OpenStreetMap is crowd-sourced, so it is uneven: a shop that exists but was never mapped will not appear, and a closed one may linger.	Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch	OpenStreetMap
Public transport accessDistance to the nearest mapped stops. Same crowd-sourced caveat as amenities — it reflects what has been mapped, not a timetable, a service frequency, or whether a route still runs.	Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch	OpenStreetMap

Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch are our launch coverage. A report runs for any New Zealand address, and outside those cities it runs fewer checks and says so. See the full matrix, city by city.

Three Auckland reports, read finding by finding

Material hazard findings, and how severity differs between them

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

Two water findings on one Auckland property that a careful buyer would act on at different speeds, with different people — a useful illustration of why “a hazard was found” is never the end of the question.

A clean result is evidence, not a guarantee

Every check came back clear. Here is what that is worth.

Every check came back with nothing detected. This one is about reading that result precisely, which is the hardest reading in the four stages above.

Material findings, screening indicators, and planning overlays

Not all evidence is the same weight

Direct parcel-level evidence, a broad screening layer and a planning overlay on the same report — the difference between them changes how hard you look and who you call.

What PropertyKete cannot replace

Two different limits apply, and conflating them is how people end up over-trusting a report. The first is coverage: checks we do not run at all, or run but hold no data for. The second is categorical: work a report is not, and would not become even with perfect data. Both are below, and neither is softened.

Coverage limits: what we do not check anywhere

Liquefaction: PropertyKete does not check liquefaction anywhere in New Zealand. No liquefaction dataset is held and no liquefaction finding appears on any report, for any address.
Tsunami evacuation and exposure zones: No tsunami dataset is held and no tsunami check runs, including for coastal addresses.
Contaminated land / HAIL: Land-use history and potentially contaminating past activities are not checked. Councils hold this information and a LIM is the usual way to get it.
Easements, covenants and consent history: Title type is shown as a property fact, but easements, covenants, interests and building or resource consent history are not assessed. These are among the most common sources of an unwelcome surprise, and none of them is in a PropertyKete report.
Terrain, slope and wind exposure as a finding: Some hazard layers use terrain internally, but there is no user-facing terrain, slope or wind finding.
Rental market context: The check is built, but no bond data is loaded, so no rental finding appears on any report anywhere in New Zealand today. Do not read its absence as a statement about rents.

Beyond that list, coverage varies by council: we currently hold more Auckland-specific hazard and planning datasets than we do for anywhere else, and for most of the country the equivalent checks return no result rather than a clean one. We do not hold every hazard or council dataset nationally, and we do not claim to.

Categorical limits: what a report is not

A LIM: A LIM is the council’s formal, legally significant statement about a property, and it includes recorded information — consents, notices, drainage, special land features — that we hold no equivalent of.
Legal due diligence: Nothing on a report reviews your sale and purchase agreement, your title, or the interests registered against it. Those are your solicitor’s work, and they are binding on you.
A building inspection: We describe the land and its context. Nothing we hold observes the building, its condition, its moisture, or the quality of work done to it.
Engineering or geotechnical assessment: Regional-scale hazard modelling describes areas. A site-specific ground question needs an engineer standing on the site.
An insurance decision: We have no visibility of any insurer’s appetite, terms or pricing for an address. Only an insurer can tell you whether and how a property can be covered.
A valuation: We publish sourced property facts and context. We do not produce a registered valuation, and nothing on the site should be read as one.

Who to contact when something needs deeper investigation

Most property questions have a profession that is well placed to answer them, and the fastest route to a real answer is usually knowing which one. Findings on a PropertyKete report name a party to consult and a document to obtain for exactly this reason — the finding is the prompt, and the person below is the answer.

Each entry says what that person can answer and where the neighbouring questions go instead. These are routes, not walls — professionals work together on the same property, and a good one will tell you when a question belongs with someone else.

The council

Answers: What is formally recorded about this property: hazards on the council’s files, consents issued and signed off, notices, drainage, zoning and the plan rules. A LIM is the standard way to get this; the property file holds the underlying documents.

Where the next question goes: A LIM records what the council holds, so the absence of something from it is not proof it does not exist. For the condition of the building, a building inspector is the right person; for what the recorded information means for you legally, a solicitor.

A solicitor or conveyancer

Answers: What you are legally agreeing to: the agreement and its conditions, the Record of Title and every interest registered against it, cross-lease and unit title structures, and settlement itself.

Where the next question goes: For the physical questions running alongside the legal ones, a building inspector can assess the structure, an engineer can investigate the ground, and an insurer can confirm whether the address can be covered. Bringing those answers back is what lets your solicitor write the right conditions.

A building inspector

Answers: The condition of the structure and its systems as they are today — moisture, cladding, roof, subfloor, decks, joinery, and visible signs of past problems or repairs.

Where the next question goes: An inspection is visual and non-invasive unless you agree otherwise, and it describes the property on the day it was seen. Where it raises something structural or ground-related, an engineer can investigate further; for hazard exposure and registered interests, the council and your solicitor are the right routes.

An engineer, including geotechnical

Answers: Questions about the ground and the structure’s response to it: slope stability, retaining walls, subsidence, foundations, and what a hazard finding actually means at this specific site.

Where the next question goes: Regional susceptibility mapping — ours, a council’s or anyone else’s — describes areas rather than sites, which is exactly the gap an engineer can close. Where remediation is on the table, your solicitor can advise on how that affects the agreement.

An insurer or broker

Answers: Whether this address can be insured, on what terms, at what excess, and with what exclusions.

Where the next question goes: An insurer prices its own view of risk, so a quote answers the insurance question rather than describing the property as a whole. Cover terms can change at renewal, and your solicitor can advise on what the agreement requires, and from when.

A planner or resource management specialist

Answers: What the plan rules actually permit for a specific proposal — the question behind almost every “could I add a minor dwelling, subdivide, or build a second storey”.

Where the next question goes: Zoning tells you the category the plan puts the land in; a planner is the person who can tell you what that means for a real proposal on a real site. The council processes the consent, and a surveyor can establish the boundaries any build has to sit inside.

A licensed surveyor

Answers: Where the legal boundaries actually are, which matters whenever a fence, structure, driveway or planned build sits near one.

Where the next question goes: Boundaries shown on any online map — cadastral parcel data included, ours and everyone else’s — are indicative. Where a survey turns up an encroachment, your solicitor can advise on the legal position.

The agent

Answers: The documents the vendor holds, the method and timetable of sale, and factual questions about the property that they are obliged to answer honestly and not to mislead you about.

Where the next question goes: The agent is engaged by the vendor and acts for them, which is normal and worth holding in mind. For advice on your own position, a solicitor is the person acting for you, and the professionals above can answer the physical and insurance questions independently.

Closing due-diligence checklist

One list, grouped by stage. It summarises the guide above rather than replacing it — a tick against an item you did not understand is worth nothing.

1. Before you get serious about a property

Identified which council the property is in.
Looked at the council’s own hazard and planning maps for the address.
Checked what a screening report did and did not look for, not only what it found.
Confirmed any school zone that matters directly with the school.
Visited the street at a different time from the open home.

2. Before making an offer

Engaged a solicitor and had them review the agreement before signing.
Obtained the Record of Title.
Ordered or obtained a current LIM.
Asked the insurer about this specific address, including excess and any exclusions.
Confirmed the method of sale, and whether an auction removes the chance to add conditions.
Checked the ownership structure — freehold, unit title, cross-lease or leasehold.

3. Before going unconditional

Building inspection completed and read in full.
Title and every registered interest reviewed by the solicitor.
LIM read with the solicitor.
Property file obtained where the LIM raised questions.
Insurance confirmed in writing for this address.
Engineer engaged where slope, retaining, foundations or ground conditions are in question.
Alterations confirmed as consented, with code compliance certificates issued.
Body corporate records reviewed if the property is a unit title.
Every open question written down with a named person responsible for closing it.

4. Before settlement

Pre-settlement inspection completed.
Chattels checked against the list in the agreement.
Insurance in force from the date the agreement requires.
Settlement statement, rates and apportionments confirmed with the solicitor.
Anything found at the pre-settlement inspection raised through the solicitor before settling.

None of this makes a property a good or a bad buy. It makes the decision an informed one, which is a different and more achievable goal.

The through-line is short enough to hold in your head: screen cheaply and early, verify with professionals before you commit, and never read silence as good news — a check that was not run has told you nothing.

This guide is general information, not advice

It describes how due diligence usually works in New Zealand. It is not legal, engineering, insurance, valuation or financial advice, and it does not take account of your circumstances or of any particular property. Every decision in it should be made with the relevant professional named above.

Coverage by city · Data sources · Worked examples · Overland flow paths · Reading flood risk · What a LIM covers · Active faults · About PropertyKete