Overseas investors have put forestry ahead of every other sector for consent applications in New Zealand, with accommodation and electricity supply trailing it on numbers that exclude consents for the homes foreign investors will live in. That is according to Toitū te Whenua Land Information New Zealand, whose Overseas Investment Office published the June decisions within a year that involved more than NZ$24 billion in transactions and overseas buyers acquiring 106,000 hectares of land.
A German insurance group took the larger of the two forestry approvals, with Sustainable Forestry New Zealand buying the 893-hectare Mangapapa Forest at Tangarakau near Stratford from New Street Capital, and Ingka Investments Forest Assets taking the 350-hectare Taringatura Forest in Southland. Owned 70 per cent of Germany through HDI Haftpflichtverband der Deutschen Industrie, Sustainable Forestry was incorporated in New Zealand for the purchases.
“The Applicants will acquire the land, and hold a forestry right over the land,” the Taringatura consent records, with the office clearing that transaction on the national interest test and noting the Dutch-owned buyer intends to keep the land in forestry.
Buying at Taringatura returns Ingka to a district where it already owns forest, with the group paying $11.34 million in October 2023 for 359.8 hectares at Westwood Forest on Waikana Road, where 293.1 hectares of standing forest were due for harvest within three years and replanting afterwards, Wood Central understands.
“We’ve got nothing to hide. We’re an open book,” Kelvin Meredith, the Ingka Investments Forestland country manager, said in July when the group opened its New Zealand estate to media for the first time, confirming a 100,000-hectare target on an estate that has reached 42,705 hectares.
Ingka puts the global estate at 495,000 hectares across seven countries, with only 14 per cent of the wood it harvests worldwide returning to IKEA products through the open market.
Parliament repealed the special forestry test from 6 March and folded existing production forests into a national interest risk assessment, which the office must finish within 15 working days, with farmland conversions still held to the higher farmland benefit test. Applications lodged before March are still decided under the old rules, and Toitū te Whenua ran new forms and consent conditions from the same date.
Ministers loosened screening for overseas buyers in March, five months after closing the Emissions Trading Scheme to new forests on Land Use Capability classes 1 to 6, with farmers selling just 1,304 hectares into forestry in the first quarter of 2026. Ingka’s New Zealand estate has reached 42,705 hectares on a stated target of 100,000, and none of the June approvals required a conversion consent or a ballot place. Ministers tightened what farmers may register, while leaving untouched what overseas buyers may purchase.
