Bracen Building Report
Issue 01 · 12 months to June 2026
New dwellings consented up 19.4% in the year to June 2026
40,581 new homes were consented across New Zealand in the 12 months to June 2026. That is 6,602 more than the year before, and the clearest sign yet that the construction recovery is broadening.
Cameron Upton
Cameron works with building companies on growth and operations, in New Zealand and across Australia, the United States and Canada. One builder sees their own order book. This report is written from a view across a lot of them.
From Cam
A year of growth is now on the board. 40,581 new homes consented in the 12 months to June, up 19.4 percent on the year before. That is the headline, and it is also the least useful number in this report. June itself went backwards on a seasonally adjusted basis, the second soft month in a row. And the regions are not telling one story, they are telling sixteen. Canterbury is running 33 percent hot. The West Coast is down 18. If you run a building company, the national number tells you almost nothing about your next twelve months. Your region does, and so does the type of work moving through it. That is why this report exists. Read the table before you read the headline.
40,581
new dwellings consented
+19.4%
vs prior 12 months
13 of 16
regions growing
What I'd do this month
- 01
Get your pricing and crew plan set before the work lands. Consents lead starts. A dwelling consented today is a build starting in the next six to twelve months, so the pipeline you see in this report is the work arriving on the ground through mid 2027. This week, sit down with your margin targets and your crew capacity and decide what you will say yes to at what price, before the phone forces the decision on you.
- 02
Work out which game your region is playing, then play that one. Growth clusters. Canterbury, Nelson, Southland and Gisborne are riding a wave. Taranaki, Manawatu-Whanganui and the West Coast are shrinking markets where every job is taken off a competitor, not lifted in by the tide. This week, pull your last 90 days of enquiry and match it against your region's number in the table above. If they disagree, the problem is your marketing, not the market.
- 03
Answer enquiries like confidence is back, because it is. Homeowners read these headlines too, and enquiry follows confidence. The builders who respond inside the hour and follow up properly will take a disproportionate share of the recovery. This week, send a test enquiry through your own website and time how long it takes anyone to reply. If the answer embarrasses you, fix that before you spend another dollar on marketing.
- 04
Plan on the 12-month number, not the monthly one. June fell on a seasonally adjusted basis and May did too, and neither changes the plan. One soft month is weather. The rolling 12-month total has now grown for a full year, and that is the number your hiring and buying decisions should hang off. This week, put 40,581 in your planning doc and stop refreshing the monthly headlines.
The national picture
The 12-month total has climbed from 33,979 to 40,581. Growth is no longer a Canterbury story alone: thirteen of sixteen regions consented more dwellings than they did a year earlier. The total is still below the 2022 peak, and the most recent month was soft, with seasonally adjusted consents falling 3.6 percent in June after a 4.9 percent fall in May. The recovery is real. It is not a straight line.
Where the growth actually is
| Region | 12m to Jun 25 | 12m to Jun 26 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Northland | 753 | 799 | +6.1% |
| Auckland | 14,295 | 17,097 | +19.6% |
| Waikato | 2,800 | 3,205 | +14.5% |
| Bay of Plenty | 1,472 | 1,700 | +15.5% |
| Gisborne | 143 | 227 | +58.7% |
| Hawke's Bay | 657 | 738 | +12.3% |
| Taranaki | 470 | 449 | -4.5% |
| Manawatu-Whanganui | 1,086 | 1,065 | -1.9% |
| Wellington | 1,889 | 2,217 | +17.4% |
| Tasman | 301 | 315 | +4.7% |
| Nelson | 240 | 324 | +35.0% |
| Marlborough | 191 | 206 | +7.9% |
| West Coast | 203 | 166 | -18.2% |
| Canterbury | 6,499 | 8,647 | +33.1% |
| Otago | 2,637 | 2,982 | +13.1% |
| Southland | 342 | 444 | +29.8% |
Canterbury is doing the heavy lifting: 8,647 consents, up 33.1 percent. The South Island as a whole grew 25.7 percent against the North Island's 16.7.
Auckland consented 17,097 new dwellings, up 19.6 percent. That is 42 percent of every new home consented in the country.
Three regions are still going backwards: West Coast (down 18.2 percent), Taranaki (down 4.5 percent) and Manawatu-Whanganui (down 1.9 percent).
Three calls
Opinions, stated plainly so they can be wrong. Each issue we make three calls and score the old ones in public.
Canterbury's 33 percent run has 12 to 18 months left before it normalises toward the national rate. No region holds growth at 1.7 times the national pace for long. The comparison base gets harder every month, and the constraints that actually cap a region, crews, sections and subbie availability, are already tightening in Christchurch. Canterbury stays the biggest engine in the country. The growth rate is what comes back to the pack.
The three declining regions are a market-share game through 2027, not a rising tide. The West Coast is down 18.2 percent, Taranaki 4.5 and Manawatu-Whanganui 1.9 in a year where the country grew 19.4. There is no wave coming to lift every builder in those markets. Every job you win there is a job a competitor did not, and the builders who treat it that way will take the work off the ones still waiting for the cycle.
The June and May seasonally adjusted falls are noise, not a turn, and the 12-month trend holds through year end. Two soft months against twelve months of growth is not a trend change, it is what a volatile monthly series does. The test is simple and we will run it in public: if the December release shows the rolling 12-month total below today's 40,581, this call was wrong.
NZ Builders Pulse
Consents tell you what was approved. They do not tell you what builders are seeing on the ground. Each month we poll the NZ Builders community on forward books, pricing and constraints. First Pulse lands next issue.
The month itself
June 2026 consented 3,471 new dwellings against 2,627 in June 2025. That is 844 more homes, up 32.1 percent on the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted basis the month was softer: consents fell 3.6 percent in June after a 4.9 percent fall in May (seasonally adjusted figures as published by Stats NZ in the June 2026 release).
Methodology
Source: Stats NZ, Building consents issued: June 2026. Series: dwelling units, new, number, actual. Figures are 12-month rolling totals computed by Bracen directly from the public data release. Bracen recomputes every figure from the source release. Nothing here is quoted second-hand. Regional figures are actual counts and are not seasonally adjusted.
-Cam
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