An immigration lawyer says New Zealand stands to lose overseas investors if the country's border entry policies thwart its economic recovery.
Photo: RNZ / Liu Chen
Wealthy Americans are leading a surge in foreign investors seeking a safe haven in New Zealand from their coronavirus-ravaged countries and economies.
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) - the government's business development agency - last reported a tenfold surge in inquiries.
North Americans accounted for more than half of those inquiries, followed by investors from Europe.
Lawyer Mark Williams said his company was swamped by an "incredible" number of American investors, including venture capitalists looking for businesses to inject money into.
The true extent of the US exodus would only become clear once visa application numbers came out the spring, he said.
"It's hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars getting lined up to come in and be invested here, which is fantastic for the economic recovery, particularly so if those people are looking to invest in more active types of investments which quite a lot of the US-based investors are," he said.
"It's international, but the US figures are just incredible. We've never been busier with [investor categories] ones and twos. We're talking about $10 million each application. But the other thing too is, it's not just the money, it's the quality of the people that we're talking to - venture capital fund operators, people looking to transition down here, invest in startups, it's just quite phenomenal."
But the downside was that offshore investor applications were not being processed, he said, and hundreds of millions of dollars were being stacked up while people waited for approval.
Others who had already invested could not get their permanent residence and apply for an exemption to border restrictions.
Williams estimated there was a year-long window of opportunity for New Zealand to capture interest from big investors but that needed government action before people lost patience, he said.
"We're not seeing any strategic planning around the increased capacity of border places for these individuals, certainty as to when they're actually going to be able to come in and invest. Of course it's all very well to have hundreds of millions of dollars in proposed investment and applications stacked up for processing - you've actually got to process them, and those people have to be able to come in, to actually get the benefit of those investments."