National will scrap Labour's ban on evictions without cause and other rental regulations if it wins the election, Chris Bishop says.
Bishop, National's Housing spokesperson, has reiterated his party's promise to do away with the 10-year bright-line test and to reintroduce interest deductibility for rentals.
National has now also revealed it will scrap the ban on landlords only being able to end tenancies for specific reasons, such as selling the house or overdue rent.
Bishop said National wanted to "bring back commonsense".
"Labour's removal in 2021 of no-cause terminations and the near-automatic rollover of fixed-term tenancies into periodic tenancies may have been well-intentioned, but they have backfired badly, discouraging landlords from offering their properties up for rent," he said in a statement.
"Mum and dad" landlords weren't the housing market's enemy, Bishop said.
"National's changes will make it easier to be a landlord, leading to an increased supply of rental properties and helping ease Labour's housing crisis."
Bishop said Labour's Residential Tenancy Act reforms had "waged a war on landlords".
He claimed Labour's changes backfired "by reducing rental supply and pushing up prices, but Cabinet pressed ahead anyway".
"Some landlords have simply decided that the risks are too great and have exited the rental market altogether, decreasing supply and putting upward pressure on rents."
This was the first of further housing announcements to be made in the coming months, Bishop said.
When Labour first announced the Residential Tenancy Act changes, then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the package's aim was to boost housing supply, remove incentives for speculators and deliver a more "sustainable" housing market.
"The housing crisis is a problem decades in the making that will take time to turn around, but these measures will make a difference," Ardern said in 2021.
New Zealand's state housing waitlist has since decreased, with 23,127 on the register as of December 31 - down 9.4 percent from a year prior.
That's despite then-National leader Judith Collins claiming in 2021 the changes would lead to "exacerbating homelessness".
