1. Work out your budget and deposit

Start with a bank or an independent mortgage adviser, and get a written pre-approval rather than a rough estimate — a pre-approval is what carries weight once you're making offers. Alongside your own savings, many first home buyers draw on a KiwiSaver first-home withdrawal and, if eligible, a First Home Grant. Both have eligibility criteria and thresholds that change over time, so confirm the current rules directly with Kāinga Ora and your KiwiSaver provider before you budget around a specific figure.

Budget for more than just the purchase price: building and LIM reports, legal fees, moving costs and any immediate repairs all come out of the same pool of cash, usually before settlement.

2. Decide what you're looking for

Location, commute, school zones if relevant, section vs unit title, and your genuine deal-breakers are worth writing down before you start looking. A clear set of criteria is what turns an overwhelming number of listings into a manageable shortlist.

Once you're looking properly, you'll be tracking more properties than fit comfortably in memory — the ones you've viewed, the ones an agent flagged, the ones still waiting on a second look. Keeping a running, structured list — with your own notes on each one — is what a free OurHouse watchlist is built for; see how it works for the full feature set.

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4. Make an offer

How you can structure your offer depends on how the property is being sold. A private treaty or deadline sale usually lets you make a conditional offer with time afterwards to complete your due diligence. An auction sale is unconditional the moment the hammer falls, which means all of that due diligence has to happen beforehand. Read auction vs private treaty for how that changes your preparation.

5. Work through your conditions

A typical conditional offer includes a finance condition, a building report condition, a LIM condition, and confirmation that insurance is available for the property. Order the LIM and book the building inspection as early as possible in your conditions period — both take time, and you want room left to act on what they say. See what a LIM report covers and what a building inspection checks for the detail on each. Your lawyer or conveyancer should be reviewing the title and the agreement itself in parallel with these.

6. Go unconditional

Once every condition is satisfied — or you've renegotiated around anything that wasn't — the agreement goes unconditional and you're committed to the purchase. This is the point of no return, so it's worth confirming with your lawyer that every condition is genuinely resolved, not just running down the clock on the deadline.

7. Settlement day

Between going unconditional and settlement, your lawyer manages the legal transfer and your lender releases funds. Most buyers do a pre-settlement inspection shortly before settlement to confirm the property and its chattels are in the condition agreed. On settlement day itself, the lawyers exchange funds and title, and you get the keys.