A Picturesque New Zealand Town Is Recruiting New Residents With Land And Home Deals

Editor’s note:  Some sources across the internet have claimed that the town is paying you to move there. They are not paying people, but only providing a deal on land and a house along with available jobs. 

A small town on the South Island of New Zealand has been facing a dilemma that many governments only dream about: an oversupply of jobs.

Kaitangata, a small town that sits on a river just a few miles from the Kiwi coast, has around 1,000 jobs to fill and not enough interested parties to take them.Two of the primary businesses looking to hire—a dairy processing plant and a meat processing plant—have been busing employees in from Dunedin, a larger city that’s more than an hour away, the Guardian reports.

The town’s mayor, local business owners and land owners got together and created a package aimed at bringing new residents to the area. The proposal offers land, new three-bedroom homes and the social services and other benefits of living in the region all for a reasonable (by New Zealand standards) $165,000 in U.S. dollars.

While little Kaitangata is desperate for new residents to fill open jobs and help support the local economy, the response to this proposal has been so overwhelming that the organizers have put land sales on hold for at least a week.

Real estate agents involved in the proposal have received upwards of 9,000 inquiries in the past week, according to Stuff. While hundreds of those inquiries were from genuinely interested individuals, the news outlet reports, many were from land developers looking to buy the land then resell it at a higher price.

What say you? If this Kiwi dream is calling your name, the first step is to determine if you’d be eligible for a work visa. Besides the factory jobs in Kaitangata, the New Zealand government’s current “skills shortage” list includes everything from computer science to nursing to winemaking, so your dream could become a reality after all.

Fore more information, visit the council website.

[h/t Mental Floss]