Find your ward and email your councillors asking them to support Land Value Rates for Auckland.
Land Value Rates would shift the rating base off buildings and onto land, without collecting a dollar more. Auckland Council’s own economists modelled the switch in 2020 and found 59% of residential ratepayers would pay less, by $476 a year on average. Well-improved homes and apartments save; vacant and underused land, which today gets a discount for sitting idle, finally pays its share.
Brighter areas have more land value tied up in sites that are worth more as bare dirt than for what’s built on them: vacant lots, car parks and land-banked sites. Under capital-value rates, holding land like this is cheap. Under Land Value Rates, using it well is what’s rewarded.
Source: Auckland Council rating valuations. 515,332 properties across the metro, weighted by land value on sites with land worth at least 62% of capital value.
The $5.5B City Rail Link opens in the coming months. Within a 10-minute walk of the three new stations, 101 hectares of land sits underused and more than 3,300 rating units are car parks. Today, building apartments above a station puts your rates up, while holding a car park keeps them down. Land Value Rates flip that incentive, and put the publicly funded windfall in station-area land values to work.
Auckland is moving to allow more homes around rapid transit and town centres. Upzoning makes well-located land more valuable. Land Value Rates encourage that land to actually be developed into the homes Auckland needs.
This finder works by suburb. A few suburbs sit across two wards; we’ll show councillors for both.
You may also want to contact the Mayor directly to support a transition to Land Value Rates.
