More than 14,000 New Zealand homes were flipped within six months of purchase during the last property market boom.
But that represented less than 3 per cent of total sales, new research by OneRoof shows.
National and Labour politicians blamed "flippers" for pushing up house prices, and introduced legislation to quash property speculation.
But data published in today's OneRoof Property Report shows house-flipping in New Zealand was not as prevalent as popularly believed.
Of the 647,133 homes sold between 2013 and 2018, OneRoof and its data partner Valocity identified 14,588 that were bought and then resold within six months.
In Auckland, of the 193,698 properties sold between 2013 and 2018, 6631 (3.4 per cent) were flipped within six months.
One Roof property writer Catherine Smith told Kate Hawkesby during that period just under 650,000 homes were sold.
"In a classic flipping situation, which is what developers, real estate agents would tell you, is within six months, there were less than 15,000 properties that were flipped over."
She says they can't find any data that says speculators were one of the drivers of the market.
"Most astonishing thing I got was a little Treasury paper, which was a recommendation to the Minister, which said we don't have empirical evidence that this was happening'."
Despite this, politicians blamed speculators for pushing up prices and brought in legislation to quash it.
The research showed that, between 2013 and 2018, 25 per cent of residential sales (165,098) were bought and then resold within five years. The median holding period for houses in New Zealand since the year 2000 is 3.45 years, and 9 per cent of those resale properties were flipped with six months.
According to the data, the "flip capital" of the country was not Auckland, but Wellington. 
Fourteen per cent of total resales (properties bought and resold within five years) in the capital between 2013 and 2018 were within six months. In Auckland, the figure was 12 per cent. Six-month flipping in Hamilton and Tauranga sat at the national average of 9 per cent.
Valocity valuation director James Wilson said nationally, the average gain on resale properties was $155,000.
In Auckland, where property values have risen 45 per cent since 2013, the difference between initial sale prices and the resale prices varied from 21 per cent in Franklin to 25 per cent in the Central City and 26 per cent in Waitakere.
In Hamilton the difference was 22 per cent, and in Tauranga it was 21 per cent. The difference dropped to 14 per cent in Christchurch, 12 per cent in Invercargill and 11 per cent in Gisborne.
Wilson said the data raised questions about the National Government's decision to introduce the bright test in 2015, which taxed gain on non-family homes bought and sold within two years.
The policy targeted speculators and was extended to five years by Labour last year.
Former Property Institute CEO and OneRoof property commentator Ashley Church said the bright line test was unnecessary as professional resellers already paid tax on their gains and investors were taxed on rental income.
"To label investors as 'speculators' is wrong," he said. "Property investors provide an important and tangible public service [as landlords] yet the Government seems to be doing everything it can to get investors out of the market and discouraging others from entering it."
Housing and Urban Development Minister Phil Twyford said the Government needed responsible property investors who were committed to providing high quality, long-term service to tenants, rather than making a "quick buck".
"A number of our policy changes have been designed to prevent a repeat of the destructive speculative frenzy that saw house prices double and the worst homelessness in generations."

The first region to begin ridding itself of bird-killing pests has made promising progress – sending hope to conservationists battling toward a predator-free New Zealand.
Taranaki's bold bid, launched a year ago, ushered in a new era of landscape-scale operations, which would be crucial to clearing all 26 million ha of possums, rats and stoats by the middle of the century.
The region was also being looked upon as a testing ground, both for new tactics and technology, and for uniting community groups, iwi and people across town and country in the mission to tackle the country's biodiversity crisis.
More than three quarters of our native birds were either threatened or at risk of extinction, largely due to pests that killed some 26 million of them every year.
Towards Predator-Free Taranaki, the biggest project of its kind, would cost $47m in its first five years, with $11.7m coming from the Government.
David MacLeod, chairman of project leader Taranaki Regional Council, told the Herald that Taranaki had unique advantages because of its relatively compact geography.
"Its regional and national expertise in biodiversity and predator control, and strong community collaboration and enthusiasm at all levels, means its great testing ground," he said.
"From the work in Taranaki, lessons can be learned and shared with the rest of the country, helping remove rats, stoats and possums from urban, rural and conservation land."
The programme was designed to clear one wedge of countryside surrounding Mt Taranaki after another, eventually covering more than 4500ha of farmland.
Those cleaned-out areas would be bolstered against reinfestation by a network of natural barriers, traps and remote sensors clever enough to alert smartphones every time a vermin was killed.
The latest monitoring data showed intensive predator control may already be making a difference – rats and possum numbers in urban New Plymouth appeared to be dropping, while the trapping network in rural and urban areas was expanding rapidly.
Monitoring, using rat footprint tracking and a possum bite-mark index, shows catch rates have dropped; rats went from 33 per cent to 19 per cent in the past year, while the urban New Plymouth possum index has fallen from 25.6 to 1.4 per cent in the past four years.
"It suggests the rapidly growing trapping network in urban New Plymouth backyards, parks and reserves is having an impact, supporting successful efforts removing predators on rural and conservation land," MacLeod said.
Other highlights in the past year included 53 possums being caught in seaside Oakura, and another 140 around its outskirts, within the past four months.
Students from 30 New Plymouth schools were analysing catches, checking traps on public land, making traps and selling traps to local residents as a fundraiser.
At the same time, the first North Island robin to be seen in 112 years at rainforest garden Pukeiti, where the programme was launched, was spotted after intensive predator control in the area.
Robin returned to Pukeiti, after being released following predator control on Egmont National Park by Taranaki Mounga Project.
New Plymouth rural landowners were beginning to manage and maintain traps using a new wireless trapping network and self-resetting traps, helping catch and monitor stoats, ferrets and weasels on a large scale, across 14,000ha between Egmont National Park and New Plymouth for the first time.

One of a range of smart traps now being used on Mt Taranaki as part of a new drive to eradicate pests. Photo / Alan Gibson
The project had initially focused on New Plymouth district in the first year, before expanding around the mountain in the coming years, but demand by residents to get traps in backyards has, at times, stretched the supply of traps.
"Trap catches may slow down soon, but that's when we know predator numbers are decreasing and we need...

I was not at all surprised by the headline over the weekend, “Twitter is detrimental to your intelligence’.
That's not the only thing it's detrimental to. Anyone who's ever used Twitter will know what a toxic cesspit of an echo chamber it is.
I can't remember when I gave up Twitter, but it was years ago - it was bad then, I'm told it's worse now.
Twitter is like your very worst example of cliquey mean girls (or boys) gathered together in a frenzied mob of re-tweets and comments generally designed to bully, ridicule or demean those who're not in their 'tribe'.
It's a wading pool of misery, which most people with 'real' friends tend to leave it behind once they see it for what it is.
But now we have facts to back up what an unhelpful place it is.
Twitter, which boasts 126 million largely angry or bored users, has offered to "reform itself" given the reputation it has as a platform for misinformation and hate.
But not just that, word is from a professor of economic policy at a University in Milan that Twitter can also make you stupid.One of the findings of his study was that Twitter "not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment, but substantially undermines it".
This was the outtake from the largest study of its kind: 1500 students examined as to the effect of Twitter on student achievement.
A test asked half the students using Twitter to analyse a novel and the other half using traditional classroom teaching: "Using Twitter reduced performance on the test by 25 to 40 per cent."
This result proved to researchers that "blogs and social networking sites actively impair performance".
What this tells us is that we should be careful about how we use social platforms - despite those on them believing they're participating in healthy debate, often times they're not.Ingesting soundbites and condensed versions of facts is not the same as reading the full story. Also, just because you and your mates might be there all sharing your views back and forth, that doesn't mean those views represent a larger chunk of society, or are based in reality, at all.
Why is this important? Well because politicians, from the President of the United States down, use it on a regular basis as a tool of communication and interaction. It's now a huge part of our political landscape.
The professor in this study pointed out that "platforms like Twitter should not replace more traditional methods of engagement, especially in grappling with complex topics".
So maybe next time you're online on a social platform – or inside a Twitter echo chamber - pause and reflect for a second - is what you're reading helping, or hindering, your intellect?

National's finance spokesperson has no regrets about how her party prematurely released budget information.
The party accessed the information by searching the Treasury website almost two thousand times.
Amy Adams told Kate Hawkesby accessing the information and releasing it was in the national interest.
"They were doing background research on the Treasury website and they stumbled upon a level of Government incompetence that I think rightly had to be brought to the public's attention."
She said the opposition was just doing its job in finding the information and releasing it.
"We had researcher who are doing what their job is which is researching and helping us prepare for the Budget, in doing that they realised that Treasury completely failed to keep the information secure."

Parents are continuing to support teachers, despite the logistical nightmare.
More than half of New Zealand's schools have been forced to close today with more than 50,000 educators walking off the job.
They're fighting for better pay and working conditions.
Gladstone Primary teacher, Kahli Oliveria, told Kate Hawkesby support from parents is unwavering.
"They are getting annoyed, they are getting frustrated but they are completely supportive, they are the ones that see us on a daily basis - they know how hard we work."

COMMENT:
What a shambles.
As I said when he first did it, I am completely bewildered as to why Trevor Mallard chose to play judge, jury and town crier in one heady moment - which as it turns out is now nothing more than a defamation suit waiting to happen.
Mallard, as Speaker of the House, was so far out of his lane I'm not sure what he was thinking.
His time as Speaker has been controversial to say the least: he injects himself too much into the politics, he rarely shows the impartiality the job requires, he allegedly leaks stories to the media - basically he can't stay out of the fray.
And now this. An alarmist assertion to the media, off the back of a bullying report, that there's a rapist on the loose in Parliament.
On top of that Mallard doubles down later that day alleging the "threat" had been removed from the building.
That so-called "threat" hopefully just went straight to a lawyer's office. I hope he gets the recourse he so justly deserves.
Everything about the way Mallard handled this, as I said at the time, was a disgrace.
From terrifying parliamentary staff, to playing judge and jury, to using the word "rape", to making the assertions publicly via the media - the whole thing was a cluster.
The man at the centre of all this, potentially the only 'victim' here now - the one branded a "rapist" - had an unsubstantiated historic complaint against him that he hugged a woman from behind.
The alleged incident was investigated and found to be without merit.
What's even more staggering in all of this, is that Mallard knew all of that. Yet he still decided to call it rape anyway.
He still decided to alarm and inflame, to label and to essentially wreck a person's career. We now hear that the man at the centre of this debacle is reportedly "in a very dark place".
So has a Government so hot on bullying, so hot on mental health, so obsessed with people's 'wellbeing', just railroaded, bullied and shamed an innocent man out of town?
I don't even think we need to wait and see whether this meets the legal definition of a defamation suit or not, Mallard needs to go either way. He's out of his depth, unprofessional, he's proven that he cannot do the one thing the Speaker is required to do: be impartial and stay in his lane.
The greatest irony being that the very man who called for a report on bullying, it seems to me, turns out to be the bully.
The incompetence he's displayed here proves the only threat to Parliament is actually ... Mallard himself.

The man stood down from Parliament could have a case to take in court, if he believes he's been wronged by the Speaker.
He was sent home in the wake of the Francis report into bullying, but strongly rejects the implication he's the serial rapist the Speaker suggested was roaming the corridors of power.
Barrister Chris Patterson told Kate Hawkesby if that's the case, he could take Trevor Mallard to court for defamation.
"Saying that someone is a rapist is probably about as bad as you can almost get in terms of damaging someone's reputation."

COMMENT:
So much passes for 'news' these days that I'm not surprised the purists are up in arms over Facebook.
In fact you don't even have to be a purist to see Facebook for what it is.
It's certainly not a 'news' site. It's a hive of clickbait and BS and seemingly a platform not remotely interested in decency, honesty or indeed, news.
Mark Zuckerberg's snubbing of Jacinda Ardern's recent Paris summit or "Christchurch Call", told us about all we needed to know about how many 'F's Facebook gives.
Speaking of which, that whole summit has gone exactly nowhere hasn't it? I mean look where we're at.
Facebook's refusing to take down a fake video of Nancy Pelosi, a video being dubbed as news, in which her speech has been altered to make her appear drunk.
No it's not endangering anyone's life, but it's still fake - and it's still targeting an innocent woman by falsely representing her.
YouTube removed it. But not Facebook, they're leaving it there.Why? Because they don't care.
Oh they know it's fake, they've acknowledged that, but they still don't care. It's been viewed more than 2.5 million times (which probably gives you a clue as to why they're leaving it up).Facebook defended the decision by saying it's up to people to make up their own minds. That's all well and good, but don't you have a responsibility to provide accurate information? Or at least show intent to?
And how then do we view Facebook? Is it a news publisher? Or a social media cesspit where anything goes?
And what about the people who can't tell the difference?
One of the commenters under the fake drunk Pelosi post said, "Why is she not arrested for being drunk while conducting federal business as a federal employee!" So not everyone gets it.
A chunk of people will believe it's real, and if you're allowing that misinformation to circulate, knowing it's false and misrepresenting someone, then are you being responsible?
I think there's a good argument these days that the responsibility ship sailed long ago for Facebook.
Really, the only mugs are us. For belonging, for giving them clicks. For sharing their crap. For commenting, for giving it credence.
Fake videos altering reality are not new, but they're usually unkind and unfair to the target. And there's always going to be a bunch of people who believe it's real.
So can we really blame Facebook for that? Or are we to blame for giving Facebook any sort of credit in the first place.

Helping young people stay connected and supported is a key part of the Government's latest announcement.
More than $150 million is being invested over the next four years into a new support service to help young people transition from state care into adulthood.
The funding's expected to help about 3000 young people aged 18 to 25.
It will also fund those aged over 18 to remain with their caregiver up to the age of 21.
Children's Minister, Tracey Martin, told Kate Hawkesby it's designed to ensure no one has to figure it out for themselves.
She says it's important they have someone to turn to for help when they encounter milestones in their lives like signing their first lease agreement.
Martin says it's hard to know exactly how many people will require the service, given 50 per cent of young people feel they don't have support elsewhere.

One expert's comparing climate change to nuclear war.
Young Kiwis around the country will strike again today.
And there are specific demands for the Government about the zero carbon bill.
Auckland University Professor Niki Harre told Tim Dower in her day the big issue was the threat of nuclear war, these days it's climate change.
She says while the two are separate issues, the approach needs to be the same.
Harre says the thing that's similar about them is the need for collaboration across borders to drive change.