Auckland house sales climb in December but new listings drop
The first month in a decade that sales have exceeded new listings.
The property market in Auckland continued its recent trend in December, with a jump in home sales and a drop in new listings, Barfoot & Thompson says.
The real estate firm recorded 920 sales last month, the highest for December in eight years, outpacing the 697 new listings, a decline of 17.6 percent from the same month of 2011.
That marked the first month in a decade that sales exceeded new listings.
Listings were "exceptionally modest, and the lowest recorded in a month for the past decade", managing director Peter Thompson says.
The average sale price for December was $624,015, down from November's record of $627,721. For the whole of 2012, the average price rose by 7.7 percent to $584,715 from 2011.
Barfoot says it had 3410 properties on its books at the end of December, the lowest since the firm started keeping records and down 10.6 percent from a month earlier.
Of total home sales in the month, 9.5 percent were for more than $1 million and 42.8 percent were for less than $500,000.
"With new listings and the total number of listings being at all-time lows, and with mortgage lending rates forecast to remain steady for the first half of 2013, the outlook for the early part of this year is for prices to hold on to the gains made in the last quarter of 2012," the company says.
(BusinessDesk)
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Auckland house sales climb in December but new listings drop
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