Welcome to this month’s wrap on North Shore property. To view our full weekly email click here.

REINZ stats for February were released this week to give us a little bit of insight into how the property market is tracking specifically here on the Beautiful North Shore, as most reports are generally Auckland or Country Wide.  Apologies but we don’t have the graphs through just yet, they will be included in next week’s report.

In This Week’s Market Wrap
– Market Performance
– Listings & Stock Availability
– Auction Results & Stats
– Coming Soon

Market Performance
Median Prices – Let’s start with the positive news – the median price for February was pretty stable at $989,000 compared to $991,000 a year ago.  Over the past 3 months vs the same period last year, prices are down about 8.5% – which is about right, you’ll find most agents talking figures around 10% as a generalisation.  Some brackets more, some brackets less.

Volume of Sales – Our predictions that the steady 2 year decline in the volume of sales here on the North Shore had stabilised late last year have seemingly proved to be wildly incorrect.  During February the volume of sales was down 35.9! And no that isn’t a typo.  

This is off the back of declines of 32.1 & 23.4% on the Shore in Jan & Dec respectively.  That’s a total of just 560 sales on the Shore for the 3 month period.  Now traditionally in March, April & May we see a sharp increase in volume but if this trajectory is anything to go by, we will certainly see an increase next month but we are not likely to see levels similar to that of 2018.

Across Auckland and the country the Volume of Sales declined year on year also, 17.8% and 9.3% respectively – so the decline is an Auckland and Nationwide trend – though not to the extent of what we are seeing on the North Shore.

Days on Market – And the reading doesn’t get much better – but this one needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  Days on Market, which has sat around the 40 day mark for some time, blew out to 63 days in Feb.  But don’t be alarmed!!  DOM always blows out a bit in Jan & Feb.  And what we’ve seen of late is a lot of the stock we’ve had on the market for some time has finally moved on, as Vendors price expectations have eventually adjusted to this new market. 

The result, a lot of older stock selling, blowing out the DOM median figures.  So let’s not panic – we’ll ignore this figure for the month and see what it looks like next month.

Listings & Stock Availability
The total number of property available on realestate.co.nz on the North Shore this morning, 1880 properties.  Previous weeks – 1865, 1851 and three weeks ago 1881. New listings are starting to flow in, as we see the pre-easter listing drive begin to hit the market.

Auction Results
Fantastic week of Auctions last week with Harcourts achieving a 58% clearance rate selling 14 out of 24 under the hammer.  Barfoot achieved a 33% clearance rate for the week at their in-rooms.  Compared to last years numbers we are just a little lower, with our 4 week average sitting around 33% compared to 35% the year prior.  

This is potentially a sign not necessarily of market improvement, but more of Vendors having adjusted expectations to fit this new environment.

Harcourts C&C – 58% Clearance Rate (14/24)
Barfoot & Thompson* – 33% Clearance Rate 10/30

Combined Rate of 44%
Current 4 week average 33%
This time last year 35% (Combined)

*Source: Barfoot website.  Please note clearance rate are for properties sold under the hammer or post negotiation that day (sales the following day are not included)

That’s it from me, if you have any questions as always just give me a call, otherwise we look forward to seeing you out and about this weekend!