About
New Zealand's home-ownership rate has fallen for two decades. Passive Partnerships is a structurally different way to share property ownership — designed to put a door back where there were only two.
Why we exist
The two ways in — rent forever, or take on $400–900k of debt — leave hundreds of thousands of Kiwis on the wrong side of a wall they can't climb. Renting builds nothing. A full mortgage is out of reach for many who could comfortably afford to own a share of a home.
There has never been a clean, fair, repeatable way to own part of a home — own the slice you can, let someone else hold the rest, and increase your share over time. So we built one.
If you can move New Zealand's home-ownership rate back above 70%, the second-order effects ripple outward — into mental health, community stability, family wealth, and the country's wider sense of fairness. Passive Partnerships is a single mechanism, but it points at a bigger question.
Why a non-profit
The model only works if the body that records ownership, sets fees, and re-prices against the market is trusted equally by both partners. Everything is formula-driven, so there are no uncertainties about how it works.
A non-profit, working to objective rules tied to an independent property index, is the simplest way to make sure neither side is being squeezed. There's no shareholder to satisfy and no incentive to push the numbers in anyone's direction — the organisation simply recovers its costs and applies the same rules, the same way, every time.
It's the same logic that let a non-profit index-fund manager undercut the entire KiwiSaver market: strip out the profit motive and the unnecessary costs, and pass the benefit to the people using it.
What we're building
A co-ownership agreement drafted with Chapman Tripp that any two parties can use to enter a partnership safely.
A non-profit body that keeps the register, receives and pays the weekly fees, sets fees against regional averages, and works for both partners.
A tax position grounded in long-established legal precedent, so both sides know where they stand before they commit.
This site, worked examples, and interactive calculators so anyone can understand the model in five minutes.
The team & partners
Founded the project after seeing the same gap from multiple angles — as a long-time NZ entrepreneur, a parent, and someone who watched the shares-vs-housing comparison play out for thirty years.
A leading New Zealand law firm providing the legal scaffolding — the standard agreement and supporting documents that make the model safe and repeatable. This work has been done pro bono, given the potential positive impact it can have on New Zealand.
Join the waitlist as a resident or an investor, and help prove that the path to a home doesn't have to have only two doors.
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