Six years of weekends, gone
In July 2020, William Lamers and Erika Koderich bought a 4ha lifestyle block between Lincoln and Springston, half an hour south of Christchurch, for $432,000. The plan was ordinary enough: build a four-bedroom home on a block that, when they bought it, was exactly large enough to qualify for a dwelling under Selwyn District Council rules.
They spent the next six years on it. Fences, a water bore, a pump station, a septic tank, trees and shrubs. By the time they engaged a building company in mid-2025, they estimated they had sunk $170,000 into the property.
Then, in October 2025, the council responded to their building consent application with news that ended the dream. The block now needed a resource consent, because the rules on highly productive land had changed. When they bought, a dwelling was permitted on productive land of at least 4ha. Within months of their purchase, the minimum jumped to 20ha. A planner quoted them $60,000 to $70,000 to prepare a consent application, with a 50/50 chance of success. They cannot afford it. Lamers is heading to Australia to work as a roofer to rebuild the savings.
The rule that did it was never local
This is not a Selwyn quirk. The rule change flowed directly from the National Policy Statement for Highly Productive Land, which took effect in October 2022. Its goal was real and defensible: in the 20 years before it landed, over 35,000 hectares of the country’s best agricultural land had been lost to development, and sub-8ha lifestyle blocks were occupying more than 170,000 hectares of it nationally.
Councils had no choice. The NPS-HPL had immediate legal effect on consent applications and forced plan changes within set deadlines. Selwyn says the changes were publicly notified through its website, media and advertising, and that engaging individually with thousands of landowners is not feasible. That is true. It is also the entire problem. The buyer’s only protection was to read a notice they did not know to look for.
This risk is sitting under a $7 billion market
The Lamers-Koderich case is not an oddity. The lifestyle market is large and live. In the year to February 2025, 6,181 lifestyle properties sold nationally for a combined $6.96 billion, at a median of $957,500. Bare land blocks sat at a median of $425,000, down 3.4% on the year, a softening that may itself reflect tighter productive-land rules eroding the value of unbuildable land.
Every buyer holding a block near the 4ha-to-20ha threshold carries the same exposure. Most will not discover it until they lodge a consent application. This is not just a lifestyle problem either. Any business sitting on land it bought for expansion, subdivision or future-proofing faces the same structural risk, and so does any lender financing land against its development potential.
No compensation, by design
Here is the part that should worry every landowner. Under the current framework there is effectively no remedy. The New Zealand Initiative noted in its February 2026 submission to Parliament that the RMA “has suppressed investment and misallocated resources for more than three decades” by restricting land use and inflating costs. The think tank argues that any durable RMA replacement needs “more explicit recognition of property rights and a principled framework for compensation where regulation removes significant existing or reasonably expected uses of land.”
Federated Farmers has pushed the same line from the farming side, arguing landowners should be compensated when overlays and plan changes strip value, pointing to one assessment that Wellington significant natural area rules would cost landowners $66 million.
The fix exists. It may not survive.
The Planning Bill 2025, introduced in December 2025 to replace the RMA, contains exactly the answer these families need: a “regulatory relief” mechanism that pays landowners when planning rules cut development value. On paper, that is the centre-right property-rights principle made law.
But councils have come to Parliament to kill it. In March 2026, they warned the environment committee the mechanism was a “substantial financial liability” that would force them to choose between paying landowners or abandoning environmental and cultural protections altogether. Ratepayers, in other words, would foot the bill.
That tension is the open question. Without a workable compensation regime, councils will keep changing rules under national direction, landowners will keep absorbing the loss, and the only obligation on the state will remain what it was for the Lamers-Koderich family: to publish a notice. Whether the next family gets a cent depends entirely on whether the regulatory relief mechanism survives the council lobby intact.
Sources
- Family’s lifestyle block now an ‘expensive paddock’ after rule changes halt dream home plans (2026-06-25)
- National Policy Statement for Highly Productive Land Infosheet (2022-09)
- Councils say they can’t afford to enforce new land protections (2026-03-13)
- Submission to Environment Select Committee on Planning Bill and Natural Environment Bill (2026-02-13)
- Feds push for compensation when overlays restrict land use