Every firm online describes itself as professional. What distinguishes them is whether the claims can be checked.
Under New Zealand immigration law, anyone giving New Zealand immigration advice must hold an IAA licence or be a New Zealand lawyer. Licensed advisers have a registration number you can look up on the Immigration Advisers Authority's public register, and if something goes wrong there is a formal complaints channel.
Our licence numbers are written on theAboutpage, along with the Taiwan emigration agency registration number (C0346).You don't have to ask us. You can check.
The problem most often discovered after signing, and the most easily avoided.
We charge a service fee for arranging and coordinating. Everything bought or supplied by a third party — furniture, appliances, utilities, cleaning, removals, government fees — ischarged at cost, with receipts, and no mark-up.
The first consultation is free and there's nothing to sign. After it you get a written feasibility assessment, an estimated timeline, the fees and the risks — then you decide whether to instruct us.You shouldn't have to pay before finding out whether you have a case.
Tax registration (IRD), enrolling with a GP and converting a Taiwanese licence are personal matters outside the service, though we'll remind you when each is due.
Rankings you can look up. Whether it suits your child, you can't.
What we actually look at: visa eligibility after graduation, how that field employs in New Zealand, the school zone and the commute, the proportion of international students, and whether the school has a real language-support contact for them.The last of those doesn't appear on any website. Someone local has to ask.
And we won't hand you a list to pick from. You get two or three specific options with the trade-offs of each, and why those ones.
Most settling-in services begin once you're here. Ours works the other way round.
Areas narrowed by zone and budget; we view in person and send film back so you can decide from overseas. The lease is explained clause by clause, and furniture and appliances are chosen to budget, ordered, delivered and installed.Fibre installation has a queue, so we apply early, and there's internet the day you move in.
House, furniture and utilities all in place, with no hotel in between. A SIM and transport card are sorted the same day (Auckland uses AT HOP, valid on buses, trains and ferries), and we hand over where the supermarkets, Asian grocers and everything else nearby are.
Declare food and medicines honestly — biosecurity checks here are thorough.
Liaising with the school and arranging enrolment, explaining uniforms, stationery and the parent communication system, and helping with the online bank application. Then the social side: other parents, community activities, and our own client gatherings.Loneliness is the most underrated difficulty of arriving.
Take the whole package or only parts of it. At the first consultation we ask which pieces you'd rather do yourself.See the full settling-in service
Visa granted, family arrived, school begun — for many agencies the service ends here.
The first weeks are when things go wrong: not following the class, not getting on with the homestay, not understanding the report, a letter from school needing a parent's reply. We keep following these, and we tell you unprompted whether your child is keeping up and whether a subject change or extra help is needed.
We're confident about this part becausemost of the team came through it themselves— some grew up here, some came at secondary school, some finished university in Auckland and stayed. We know what the first year of not understanding the lesson feels like.
This question decides whether the other five answers mean anything.
Trouble at school usually happens on a New Zealand morning. If your adviser is overseas, that's the small hours where they are — and however conscientious, all they can do is pass a message.
Our team is based here. The people who answer the phone, go to the school and view the house are the same people, with no third party in between. There is a registered emigration agency in Taiwan to contract with and licensed advisers here doing the work, andboth sides share one principal.
But for someone not confident in English, how do you explain the whole thing? How do you convey what a mother actually feels, what isn't sitting right, and what she'd like the school to do? It isn't as easy as it sounds.
Sometimes I think: if Jomel hadn't been there, who would I have turned to when this came up at school?
From Mrs Chen's letter | Read it in full →The six questions above are about safeguards during the work. This part is about the order of planning — why our first question is never “which school do you want to apply to?”
School information isn't hard to find; rankings, fees and entry requirements are all online. What's hard iswhich choice actually suits you. The same student can apply to many schools and programmes, but the career direction behind each may be entirely different — especially for someone with work experience already. What we care about is continuing that experience, not turning yourself back into an inexperienced graduate for the sake of studying abroad.
The school affects housing and daily life; the programme affects where you go after graduating; the job you find may affect what's possible for your status later. So we look at the whole thing:
The full version, including when we advise against going ahead, is inStudy planning: working back from after graduation.
When assessing an adviser, what they decline to do is often more informative than what they offer.
Under the IAA code of conduct, a licensed adviser may not promise an approval. Any guarantee of success is worth a follow-up question. What we can promise is an application good enough to file, and an honest account of where the risk sits.
If the assessment says the circumstances aren't there or the timing is wrong, we say so rather than taking a fee and working it out later. Some cases are better waited on; some are better taken by another route.
Furniture, appliances, utilities, translation, certification, government fees — all at cost with receipts. We're paid for the service, not from a margin you can't see.
Three accounts, in our clients’ own words. The first two were recorded once their move was complete; the third at our annual gathering, where families who have already settled here meet one another — and where we asked them why they chose New Zealand, and why they brought the work to us.
Filmed by Jomel. Each account reflects that person's own experience at the time and is not a guarantee of any application outcome. The player loads only when you click. More videos are in the video section of our blog.
No pitch, no contract. Tell us your child's age, where they are in school and your timing, and we'll tell you what can be arranged, roughly how long it takes — and which parts we can't do.
