What NZ’s Largest Mortgage Broker Really Sees Happening in Property Right Now

John Bolton is the founder of Squirrel, New Zealand’s largest mortgage broker doing around $3 billion in mortgages annually, and one of the country’s biggest non-bank construction lenders with $700–800 million deployed into development finance.

In this episode, John Bolton sits down with John Kenel for a straight-up conversation about what is really happening in the New Zealand property market right now.

They cover buyer confidence, yield, pre-sales, product mistakes, developer margins, down-sizers, and where the next opportunities may be setting up.

What you’ll learn:

- What Squirrel is seeing across $3 billion a year of mortgage activity

- What $700–800 million in development finance says about the state of the market

- Why buyer confidence is still uneven

- Why yield now matters more than easy capital gains

- The product mistakes developers keep making

- Why storage matters more than many people realise

- Why down-sizers are an overlooked opportunity

- What is happening to margins on real projects