The Sunday Star Time headline today would have the reader believe that sales of mortgagee property (re-possessed by the bank) are rising at a “frightening” rate.
The article makes the following quote:
“TradeMe’s head of property Brendon Skipper and realestate.co.nz’s Alistair Helm say the speed of the increase is frightening”
I would like to set the record straight as I would not like to be misrepresented.
- I did not in the conversation with the journalist state that the rise in the number of listings of mortgagee properties on the market was “frightening” – I can accept that the quote could be misattributed as it seems to be a “joint quote” from both Brendon Skipper and myself. Clearly I cannot speak for any comment made by Trade Me.
- The level of listings on realestate.co.nz of properties that are described as mortgagee is not “frightening” – the fact is that today there are 298 listings – this represents just 0.37% of all residential property listings on the website. There are 81,252 residential listings of properties for sale from a total of over 117,000 listings on the website. A figure of 0.37% represents one listings in every 270.
- The current level is significantly higher than this time last year when the total was 122, however as shown in the graph displayed just last week on this blog the current level of 298 is not the highest level witnessed on this website – back in the final week of October last year the total stood at 311.
- The blog post last week “Mortgage listings on the rise” (which was the source content I directed the journalist to review) contained some valuable comments – one particularly from someone who has taken the time to review some of these “mortgagee” listings and had noted that they were not all true mortgagee properties for sale. Some had included the word “mortgagee” in phrases such as “Cheap Like a Mortgagee Sale!!” & “You Want Mortgagee Pricing??” . It is important to reinforce the fact that the real estate industry and our website does not have a specific category of listing which uniquely defines “mortgagee” – therefore any search for “mortgagee property”on the site is using a keyword search for the term in the listing description.
- Finally it is important to note that the newspaper headline states “mortgagee sales rise” – the only fact in the article is that the number of listings on 2 major websites which feature the word mortgagee is significantly up on a year ago. There are no facts availble in the real estate industry stating that the sale of mortgagee property is rising, or even how many mortgagee properties have been sold.