Labour’s fake landlord data

The Herald reports:

The Government has hit out at Labour for using misleading figures when claiming its policy of reinstating interest deductions for landlords would create a class of landlord millionaires, a claim it has repeated on and off since the election campaign.

In a press release from the weekend, Labour’s Finance spokeswoman Barbara Edmonds said the policy, which allows landlords to reduce their tax bill by deducting interest costs would “give approximately 346 landlords who own at least 200 properties each around $464 million between them”. …

The calculation uses bond lodgement data to work out how many individual properties the person lodging the bond is responsible for. Data for bond lodgement registers the number of bonds each individual entity has lodged, broken down into tiers of 1, 2-3, 4-10, 11-20, 21-50, 51-200, and more than 200.

The Ministry notes this data is not a reflection of the number of properties someone owns. Rather, it is a reflection of the number of properties someone is responsible for lodging bonds for. And the big dog when it comes to lodging the most bonds are not landlords who own hundreds of properties, but property management companies, who manage hundreds of properties on behalf of other people.

It is obvious to anyone not a moron that companies that lodge bonds are not necessarily the owners. Surely the Labour Party has heard of property management companies.

They must have known this was a false claim. Common sense alone would tell us there is no way there are 350 people who own 200+ homes each.

The actual number it seems is one!