Our regulatory systems

Toitū Te Whenua is responsible for 4 regulatory systems: Property Rights, Property Information, Crown Land and Overseas Investment.

Our regulatory systems

Property Rights

The Property Rights system is the state-guaranteed system of property rights, restrictions and responsibilities over most land and property in New Zealand. This system relies on the survey and geodetic sub-systems which establish property boundaries to which rights apply.

Property Information

The Property Information system provides a range of (non-private) information used for making property-related decisions. It includes information underpinned by legislation, including two significant subsystems:

  • the Ratings Valuation system 
  • the Geographic place naming system.

Crown Estate 

The Crown Estate regulatory system is made up of the:

  • Crown Pastoral Land system, which provides for Crown-owned land to be leased for pastoral farming
  • the Crown Estate Management System, which enables the Crown to acquire and dispose of land in a way that balances both the public interest and property rights.

Overseas Investment

The Overseas Investment system regulates overseas investment in New Zealand’s sensitive assets (including land, significant business assets and fishing quota).

Our legislation

We are responsible for administering 12 Acts. We are also responsible for secondary legislation made under those enactments.

See a list of the legislation we administer

Our approach to regulatory stewardship

We have statutory obligations for the stewardship of our regulatory systems. Regulatory stewardship is the governance, monitoring and care of our regulatory systems. To be effective stewards, we aim to take a proactive and collaborative approach to maintaining and improving the health of our regulatory systems so that they continue to provide benefits to New Zealanders over the long term.

To meet Government expectations for regulatory stewardship, we take an end-to-end view of our regulatory systems. All our regulatory systems have two main components: design and delivery. Our regulatory functions range from setting policy to monitoring and evaluation. While we do not perform all functions across each of our regulatory systems, we are responsible for ensuring that all the functions and the entities that carry them out work well together.

Diagram of regulatory system