Where insurance and mortgage enquiry demand concentrates, and how to match where you buy to what you can actually service.
Figures in this article describe the wider market and are drawn from the third-party sources listed at the end. They are not Lead Foundry results, and nothing here is a projection of what any individual broker will achieve.
Brokers ask which regions produce the most enquiries. The honest answer is that nobody publishes that, and the useful answer is that the question you can act on is a different one.
Because the data would have to come from lead suppliers, and every supplier's view of demand is a view of their own media buying rather than of the market. A supplier who advertises heavily in one area will report that area as high demand, which is true of their supply and says nothing about the underlying market.
What to be sceptical of: Any published "demand index" from a lead vendor. It measures where they bought traffic. That may still be useful to you as a supply forecast, and it is not a market measurement.
| Signal | Where it comes from | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| New mortgage lending by borrower type | RBNZ C31 | Where first home buyer and investor activity sits |
| New mortgage lending by purpose | RBNZ C33 | The split between purchase, refinance and other |
| Sales activity and time to sell | REINZ monthly updates | Whether transactions are moving |
| New housing loan commitments | ABS Lending Indicators | Direction of Australian borrowing activity |
| Cover rates and the protection gap | FSC research | Where the insurance opportunity is structurally |
For context on the current picture: REINZ reported a national median sale price of NZ$753,106 in January 2026, up 0.4% year on year, with a national median of 54 days to sell. ABS recorded total new dwelling loan commitments falling 6.2% by number in the March quarter 2026.
On the insurance side the structural signal is larger than any regional one. FSC research found only 41% of New Zealand respondents hold life insurance and 11% hold income protection, with around 70% underinsured.
Not where demand is highest, but where your ability to convert is highest. Those are different maps and the second one is the one you control.
Filter to what you can service, then widen only when contact and appointment rates hold at the current setting for two consecutive months. Widening early converts a quality problem into a volume problem.
Be specific with the supplier about what a mismatch looks like, and put it into your written invalidity criteria. An enquiry you are not licensed or accredited to help is a defensible replacement claim if it was defined in advance, and an argument if it was not.
Where Lead Foundry sits, in plain terms: Lead Foundry currently supplies life insurance enquiries in New Zealand. Mortgage supply opens when LoanWatch launches. So the filtering discussion here applies to the insurance supply we do sell, and the mortgage and Australian sections are written from the public data rather than from our own book.
No published index of broker enquiry demand exists for New Zealand or Australia. Any vendor-published demand index measures where that vendor bought media rather than where the market is. The public signals worth reading instead are RBNZ lending statistics and REINZ activity in New Zealand, and ABS Lending Indicators in Australia.
Only where your licensing, accreditations and competence reach, and where you can service the appointment without friction that suppresses attendance. A well-qualified enquiry you cannot advise on is worth nothing, and under the Code of Professional Conduct competence is a standard rather than a preference.
Start narrow, matched to what you can service, and widen only after contact and appointment rates have held for two consecutive months. Put the mismatch definition into your written invalidity criteria before supply starts, so an out-of-scope enquiry is a defensible replacement claim rather than an argument.
The Reserve Bank publishes new residential mortgage lending by borrower type (C31), by purpose (C33) and by loan-to-value ratio (C30). REINZ publishes monthly sales activity, median prices and days to sell. Together they show direction and composition, which is what you can act on.