Welcome to this month’s market wrap on North Shore property.
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With 5 days of sunshine forecast (on one of the apps anyhow) it’s hard not to be positive! To follow on from last weeks monthly wrap, this week REINZ released their data for the NZ housing market so I’ve got a little bit of commentary around that for you further down.
New to my Reports?
For anybody a little new to my reports, the REINZ data is the most
complete and accurate set of data available in NZ. My reports and stats
are based on this information, and my commentary is a combination of
REINZ, Core Logic (which is QV, Property Guru etc.), Harcourts &
Barfoot results plus AMP Capital, BNZ, realestate.co.nz, and obviously
what I’m seeing on the coal front week to week here on the North Shore.
But I do strongly believe you cannot provide complete commentary
without starting with the REINZ reports.
Why do I mention this? I’ve received a few reports in the post and on email lately that skew stats to talk things up, and they are based solely on their own companies data – which is not a representation of the market as a whole. Also, the reports don’t reference where the data is from or what area they represent – they read and are presented as the data for my area – as though they are relevant to me. But actually, (because I know my data) I can see it’s Auckland wide, and from that company only. So not only is it a small data set, it’s not even area specific. The North Shore is behaving a little different to Auckland as a whole, and Auckland is quite different to NZ as a whole – it’s important to know where the data is from and what area it relates to.
In my reports we will always aim to reference the area we are referring to, where the data is from, and note when commentary is stats based, or just opinion. As clearly my opinion based reporting isn’t always correct!!
In This Month’s Market Wrap
– January Update
– Auction Results
– Should we still go to Auction?
– Coming soon
A quick update on January
Last weeks report was pretty comprehensive so let’s just keep it
short and touch on the key points that have come out of the REINZ data.
Remember January seasonally is an average month, so we can’t really
draw any conclusions for the year to come from it, unfortunately we
won’t really know (or at least we won’t have evidence) how 2019 is going
for a few months.
On the Shore in Jan 2019, sales volume was down, big time, -32.1% with only 152 sales! Median prices were also down (no surprises here) -6.1% to $920,000 and days on market remained the same year on year at 44 days. Again no surprises.
Now remember these sales are the roll on effect from last year, so none of it is surprising really. New listings in December were down -17.8% across Auckland (can’t get north shore only sorry), and we already knew that buyers were sitting on their hands a bit, so volume was always going to falter in January with no stock, and many still waiting to see what was going to happen with the market. Or many Vendors opting to wait for more buyers to come back in Feb before selling.
Across Auckland it all reads a little better, median prices pretty much held year on year only dropping -2.4% from $820,000 to $800,000. Volume also dipped a little but just -2..8%. Days on market jumped out though, 51 days!! Seems like an anomolay, let’s only start to worry if it’s the same figure next month!
If you’re wanting some positive news, (here comes the spin) across Auckland, median prices have hardly changed on average over the past 6 months. In fact they have hardly changed over the past 2 years! The average median for the past 12 months (2018) is $850,916 – the 12 months prior (2017) $853,066. That’s a .25% adjustment! (Do we have any statisticians reading this, I’d love to know if averaging medians is okay)
Auction Results
It’s still early days in 2019 for this data to be useful as their
hasn’t really been a whole lot of Auction called just yet. Last week
only 31 Auctions were called between the two big blue companies of
Harcourts and Barfoot, with a combined rate of 35% – much the same as
last year really. The week prior that number was 44% but I’m not sure
that is accurate as we only have 4 auctions recorded for Barfoot during
the week, which doesn’t seem right.
Should we still go to Auction?
Given the results it’s an understandable question and there is not
straight answer. Basically, it depends on you and your property. But
the majority of the time my answer is still yes and I will come back to
why. First home buyer specific product, maybe not, they all have
financial implications and Kiwisaver issues etc. that makes it hard for
them to bid.
Put it like this, the Auction campaign takes about 20 days, average days on market is 40 give or take. If your Auction doesn’t work, it doesn’t tarnish the property or campaign. So there is no risk if it fails. Therefore wouldn’t you want to give yourself the chance of either getting a great result through competition at Auction, or even just a good or fair result, in half the time and unconditional? If it doesn’t work, then you price it afterward based on good actual market feedback that your Agent has been able to accumulate over the past 20 days from all the people that have been through. If it does work, happy days!
In my mind going to Auction gives you a crack at everything. Your for sale by negotiation first (pre-auction offers), then you go to Auction and if that doesn’t work you price it, and if you get the price right, you might generate a multi offer, which is like a Tender. So you essentially get a crack at all four methods of sale. Further if you get the pricing right afterward, it should sell in the next 20 days, so you should be sold in the standard median timeframe of about 40 days – and there is nothing wrong with that.
Coming Soon
Takapuna – A fantastic 3 bedroom townhouse
Bayswater – 2 properties, 3 houses, loads of potential and upside
Northcote Point – A little cracker and a great bolthole or starter
Browns Bay – 2 houses on freehold sites, a some land
Northcote – A super cute 3 bed bungalow
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!
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