New Zealand Land Value Model

In 2016 the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) commissioned us to help them write their National Policy Statement on Urban Development Capacity, which guides local authorities in planning for urban development.

As part of this project we helped MBIE develop a new suite of measures of the impact of local government policy on house prices. To that end we created the New Zealand Land Value Model (NZLVM), a software package to model New Zealand land value differences across zoning boundaries, such as rural-urban and industrial-residential.

In building NZLVM, we combined spatial and econometric processing into one code base for reproducible analyses. We handled ~14 GB of economic and geographic data, including all ~3 million New Zealand primary land parcels, and encoded several complex spatial calculations parallelized for speed. We put this all into one software package that MBIE could then maintain.

After we finished NZLVM, MBIE distributed its outputs to 23 local councils around New Zealand as supplementary technical guidance to the National Policy Statement.