At 4.17am this morning we processed our one millionth listing onto the website of realestate.co.nz – a significant milestone!
The website began life in August 2006 when the former REINZ website of RealENZ was shut down and the new website burst onto the market. Since that time over 1 million listings have been featured on the website over the past 1,290 days – that equates to an average of 775 per day or around 32 new listings every hour of everyday.
Realestate.co.nz is the most comprehensive website for all categories of real estate listings in NZ as marketed by licensed real estate agents. The site covers the full spectrum from homes for sale and rent, commercial property for sale or lease, farms and agricultural land as well as businesses for sale.
More than half of the million listings have been made up of properties for sale. A total of 545,000 have been homes for sale – the biggest year was 2007 with 165,000 new listings comparing with the quietest year last year with just 125,000.
Commercial property for lease and for sale have comprised over 90,000 listings with a steady growth in each of the past 2 years – 2009 alone saw just over 30,000 new listings come onto the market.
A massive 77,ooo listings have been featured for building sections. This sector reached a peak in 2008 with 21,000 before falling back somewhat last year to 17,000.
Since day one realestate.co.nz has enjoyed the support of the vast majority of the real estate profession – a commitment that has grown stronger over the years to see now over 94% of all licensed offices using the site – far ahead of the nearest competitor Trade me property.
Taking the live data as of today – realestate.co.nz has for example 50,184 homes for sale. This compares to 42,499 on Trade me.
As most people appreciate one of the key differences between the two sites is that Trade me takes adverts from homeowners looking to sell privately. In a recent NBR article Trade me highlighted that 16% of their property listings were from private sellers – applying this calculation would mean that today 35,699 listings from licensed real estate agents are featured on Trade me Property as compares to 50,184 on realestate.co.nz. In other words a search on Trade me only shows 60% of the local market for real estate listings of homes marketed by licensed real estate agents.
Note: The NBR article states that Trade me features 100,000 properties – this is the number of total listings covering all categories that are displayed on the website.
The category of homes for sale excludes lifestyle property and sections for sale but does include apartments and townhouses as well as units and home and income properties.
alistair
insightful figures, but guess trademe would argue the validity of your assumption.
though not specifically related to this post, i would welcome your thoughts on the article in Sunday’s paper which used your comments under the headline “house prices set to slide”…
Tim,
I am not sure how Trade me would argue the validity. If they did they would be most welcome to post a comment / raise an issue / correct an assumption. If I am wrong I will be the first to retract and publish new figures.
Trade me property reported this fact that 16% of their listings are private sales so this calculation is purely based on that fact.
In regard to the Sunday Star Times headline, as you saw I did not state that “house prices set to slide” – that was the headline created by the journalist, I merely shared the data from the February NZ Property Report.
As far as interpretation of facts, the scale of listings for homes coming onto the market in February was very high – this pushed up inventory of unsold houses. This rise in supply unless matched to rise in demand will put pressure on sellers. It will be up to them to respond – they can withdrawn a listings, hold out for their asking price or drop their price.
One thing I have learnt in this industry nobody becomes famous for making forecasts – you do however become infamous!
Infamous – absolutely.
Can’t speak for the rest of the country, but here in Christchurch we are already starting to see listings being withdrawn – especially where the sellers have not liked what the market has said at auction!