The country is in such desperate need for this data that whatever formats and data structures you can provide would be a great start! The key things we need are: * break down by land vs capital value <- this is the most essential, we need to know whether the main problem is land prices or construction costs * time series <- we need to know how things have been changing over time, this is critical to identifying causes and solutions * break down by geographical location <- obviously the more fine-grained the better * break down by property class <- separate out residential from rural, commercial, industrial and apartments from detached dwellings... again, whatever classification you have is fine, some data is better than no data

For maybe a decade now, property prices have been the most important political issue in New Zealand but there are few publicly available sources of statistical information other than "the average house price" which is a severely limited metric. It only includes residential properties, only tracks capital value and doesn't show regional differences.

It's extremely difficult for the media, public and expert groups to assess the value of various proposed policy solutions without high-quality data.

Moreover, this information is clearly available. The land and capital value of every property in the country is assessed on a regular basis for rating purposes. This is the most important crisis affecting our country pre- and post-COVID.

Statistical data on property prices is clearly of huge public interest and any claims of commercial sensitivity are transparently illegitimate. Similar requests seem to have been met by bureaucratic buck-passing and general dodging tactics. The data exists. You have it. It is of an extremely high degree of public importance. There is no legitimate reason not to release it. Please make it publicly available.

It is clearly infeasible to request data from 67 different local councils. It is impossible to get consistent and full national coverage through this approach.

It's also impossible to analyse the housing price problem through the one publicly available statistic, the national house price.

The national house price doesn't account for the different between land value and improved value.

It doesn't account for local variation (e.g. price variation between big cities and regional centres, urban cores and suburbs, rural areas close to metropolitan areas and remote rural areas).

It doesn't tell us what's happening to apartment prices.

It doesn't tell us anything about the prices of land in office buildings, industrial property or agriculture land. This last point might not be directly related to the housing crisis but it might still yield insights - who knows? We don't know what we can learn from the data unless you release it. And the price of non-residential properties does have a bearing on the effect of various proposed tax policy solutions to the housing crisis.