Rental bond data
This rental bond data provides information about the activity level in the housing rental market since January 1993. By comparison, the market rent online tool provides rental information for the previous 6 months.
Rental bond data, January 1993 to November 2021
Last updated 14 January 2022.
Updated monthly
- By territorial authority, January 1993 to November 2021 [CSV, 1.9 MB]
- By region, January 1993 to November 2021 [CSV, 533 KB]
Updated quarterly
About the data
The files above are for private bonds, starting from January 1993. 'Private' means private sector landlords.
This data comes from our tenancy bond database, which records all new rental bonds that are lodged with us each month.
It is listed by tenancy start date and uses the SA2-2019 area definitions from Statistics NZ. Privacy protection measures have been applied; fixed random rounding is applied to base 3 and there is a suppression of results when there are fewer than 5 bonds for any given selection.
The files are updated each month and do not include the most recent month’s data, for example files released in June will contain information up to the end of April.
Make sure you always use the latest file available. This is because the time taken between a bond being lodged and the details being recorded in the database can cause figures for the latest month to change the next month. Landlords have 23 working days to lodge a bond with Tenancy Services, the bond lodgements are then processed which may take 10-15 working days.
Tenancy Services records all new rental bonds that are lodged each month for operational purposes only. Queries regarding the analysis of data or data trends can be directed to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
Ministry of Housing and Urban Development website(external link)
Use the Market Rent API
The API is a service that, with relevant technical knowledge, can be used in a self-service manner to generate market rent data for a range of user-specified criteria including time period, area definition type, and geographic location.
Analytical note: medians and quartiles for rent data
Median and quartile data for rents are often requested in order to understand the distribution of rents in a region. This is especially important for social housing, as social housing is not typically targeted at average households.
However, rents tend to cluster at round numbers – a weekly rent of $300 is much more common than a rent of $297.50. This has an effect on median and quartile measures (which are based on actual values from the data), as they tend to plateau for months at a time, before increasing $10 or $20. This can make analysing time series of medians and quartiles difficult.
For this reason, we have developed alternative measures for use with rent data:
- Geometric mean (replacing median): The geometric mean is calculated by multiplying values together and taking the nth root of the result. When a variable is log-normally distributed (a common distribution for variables that must be greater than 0) the geometric mean will closely approximate the median.
- Synthetic Quartiles (replacing quartiles): The synthetic quartiles are designed to find the 25th percentile (for the lower quartile) and 75th percentile (for the upper quartile) of a set of data, assuming the data is lognormally distributed. The mean and variance of the data are not assumed, but instead are calculated. This approach is consistent with using the geometric mean to approximate the median.
Using data under Creative Commons
We're making this raw data available under a Creative Commons licence. This means you can use the data free of charge to perform your own analysis, as long as you credit us ('The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment') as the source of the data.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand License.(external link)
