Rental Bond NZ

Overview

Read-only CLI wrapper for Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) / Tenancy Services rental bond and market-rent data.

This skill covers:

• Discoverable public MBIE/Tenancy rental-bond CSV releases (monthly by regional/territorial area and detailed quarterly)
• Market-rent endpoint for suburb-level current-range rent snapshots (active bonds, lower/median/upper quartiles)
• Automatic CKAN mirror discovery for dataset metadata and alternate discovery paths

No authentication, no API key, and no browser automation required for this skill.

When to Use

• A task asks for NZ rental bond activity (lodged, active, closed bonds) over time by area
• A task asks for market-rent snapshots by location, property type, and bedroom size
• A task needs direct links and metadata for the MBIE/Tenancy public release files and CKAN records
• Another workflow needs machine-readable housing-rent trend data for policy/research automation

Commands

Run with:

python3 skills/rental-bond-nz/scripts/cli.py <command> [flags]

• datasets [--query Q] [--limit N] [--json] - discover Tenancy bond and related datasets via tenancy.govt.nz links and data.govt.nz package search
• bonds [--from YYYY-MM] [--to YYYY-MM] [--area NAME] [--scope tla|region|quarter] [--limit N] [--json] - monthly bonded-tenancy rows filtered by period and area
• areas [--query Q] [--city CITY] [--limit N] [--json] - discover market-rent city/suburb values from the Tenancy autosuggest endpoint
• market-rent --area NAME [--city CITY] [--suburb SUBURB] [--property-type PROPERTY] [--bedrooms N|N+] [--period YYYY-MM] [--json] - fetch market-rent rows for a location/property combination

Examples

python3 skills/rental-bond-nz/scripts/cli.py datasets --json
python3 skills/rental-bond-nz/scripts/cli.py bonds --from 2025-01 --to 2026-06 --area "Auckland" --scope tla --json
python3 skills/rental-bond-nz/scripts/cli.py areas --query Auckland --json
python3 skills/rental-bond-nz/scripts/cli.py market-rent --city Auckland --suburb Avondale --period 2025-10 --property-type apartment --json
python3 skills/rental-bond-nz/scripts/cli.py market-rent --area "Auckland - Avondale" --bedrooms "2" --json

Notes and caveats

• Market rent output is a six-month window (for the current/latest period returned by the tenancy endpoint), not a single reference date.
• Bond datasets are rounded and privacy-suppressed by source, consistent with MBIE/Tenancy's public methodology.
• Market-rent and release metadata are hosted on tenancy.govt.nz; CKAN package data is used for discoverability and fallback metadata only.
• If upstream pages or endpoints are temporarily blocked, the command returns upstream_unavailable for structured handling.

Resources

• scripts/cli.py
• references/api-notes.md
• scripts/smoke_test.py