Welcome to this weeks wrap on North Shore property.
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In This Week’s Market Wrap:
– How’s the Market?
– Listings & Auctions
– New Meth Contamination Report rebuffs current rules
– Blanket Drive for the Auckland City Mission
We’re in the Top 30 Harcourts Agents on the Planet!
Just quickly we rec. a nice surprise this week, finding out we have made the Top30 Harcourts Agents on the PLANET!! Out of over 6500 agents Worldwide! Rankings aren’t actually a goal of ours, taking care of customers and providing the best experience possible is the over arching team goal, but a few awards along the way are always nice 🙂
How’s the Market
I’m still being asked on a daily basis, and the market is still fine!! And we’ve been saying it for over 12 months now. It’s not amazing but it’s not bad either it’s still just fine and hasn’t really changed. Prices are still fluctuating up and down a few percent, volumes are still low they also fluctuate a bit year on year but ultimately they are still very low. Days on market remain in the mid-high 30’s, and there are still opportunities out there for both sides of the deal but for the majority of people, they are buying or selling for an average price, as is the nature of a stable flat market. But average is good – that’s what Vendors need to get their head around. Especially if you can be sold in a short time-frame.
Here’s a positive quote to kick off your Saturday morning from Tony Alexander of the BNZ this week: “As I’ve noted for upwards of a year now, the Auckland housing cycle’s exciting part has done its dash and will now be generally directionless with an eventual upward bias for a few years – perhaps until 2021. Then a new upward leg may well kick into gear.”
Listings & Auctions
Stock levels continues to tighten as we move into Winter with around 1650 properties available on the Shore on realestate.co.nz which is about 10% down on the height of summer. Buyer numbers through open homes are still pretty strong, and combined with the tightening of stock and low auction volumes – we expect to see a continuation of our improved clearance rates which have been up a few points averaging 47% for the past three weeks here at Cooper & Co.
New Meth Contamination Report
A new report has been released by the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor which questions all our assumptions around ‘safe’ meth contamination levels in residential houses.
The report essentially says the old trigger level of 1.5 mcg per 100 sq cm was way too over-zealous and contamination levels would have to be many, many times higher to even have the possibility of causing negative effects.
This has clearly caused a a LOT of negative fallout from the many many property owners that were effected by positive tests and essentially lost a lot of money in value, or costs with cleaning the homes. Also the hundreds of tenants that were booted out of their rental property for a positive test at levels indicating casual use, which this report essentially says, would have had no effect on health. And rightly so.
To now be told actually, the positive test may not have been that bad and didn’t warrant any negative response? It’s interesting because we don’t test properties for Drano use on carpets, but I still wouldn’t want my child crawling around on Drano contaminated carpet would I? This industry has popped up very fast and has essentially been scare mongering the public into spending $100’s of millions on testing and cleaning based on the stigma associated with this particular drug.
Sure if the home has been used as a meth lab absolutely put a match to it, but contamination from a little casual use? How bad can it really be given the many many other chemicals we expose ourselves to on a daily basis. Based on this new report – not bad at all. Unfortunately it’s already cost a lot of people a lot of money, time & heartache, whilst making a lot of those in the industry very wealthy along the way.
If you want to read more, my friends from Relatable Real Estate in Wellington have written a great blog which really sums it all up well, and includes a number of very interesting articles. We are still waiting for the Ministry of Health Standards to be updated, but this is going to be an interesting topic and expect to see plenty of lobbying going on from the Meth Test companies trying to counter this report – for pretty obvious reasons. In the meantime – check out the blog here, and if you need real estate advice in Wellington – be sure to speak to Andrew & Kahn.
Coming Soon
We have plenty of new listings in the pipeline and coming soon, be sure to check out our website for current listings, or get in touch about anything detailed below. There are still plenty of off-market deals happening so be sure to get in touch with myself or my team if you want to be kept in the loop.
Takapuna – A sunny semi-detached townhouse
Greenhithe – A super spacious one level home
Browns Bay – A gorgeous renovated townhouse
Castor Bay – A beautiful modern family home
That’s it from me, have a great weekend and GO THE ALL BLACKS!!
Have a great week!
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