There was a time just a few weeks ago when the media wires were abuzz over the shear scale of mortgagee property sales. It reached a crescendo in mid February with the somewhat exceptional Sunday Star Times headline of Mortgagee sales rise ‘frightening’
Well it appears that our national fascination for such properties has waned significantly both in terms of the interest in searching for such property and also for the availability for such properties on the market. The chart below shows the level of inventory of mortgagee listings (blue area of the graph) tracked against the level of searching for the keyword of ‘mortgagee’ on the site (red line) as represented by the % of all keyword searches each week.
The word ‘mortgagee’ is still the #1 search phrase on the site with over 1,000 searches in the past week, however this was dwarfed by levels of 3,500 per week in mid February – such is the power some might say of the media to drive interest in this property market.
In addition to a cooling of searching interest the number of mortgagee property listings on the website has been steadily declining with the level of new listings not keeping pace with those on the market finding buyers. From a peak of 412 listings in the second week of February the number has declined to the latest level of just 335. Out of interest this total is an audited number that excludes listings (18) which seek to leverage the keyword of mortgagee to attract viewer attention.
On a regional basis the majority of mortgagee properties definitely lies within the main metropolitan centers with Auckland accounting for 45% of all the listings closely followed by 17% in Canterbury, then followed by the Bay of Plenty and the Waikato with 7% a piece and Wellington a distant player with just 3% of all listing. The graph below shows the average number of listings over the past 6 weeks as compared to a year ago.
The trend of mortgagee listings had shown a steady rise through all of 2008 to reach a peak of 423 in the middle of November whilst declining at Christmas time before rising again through January. The one irrefutable fact of mortgagee properties is that they cannot sit on the market for an indefinite period unlike normal property listings – there is urgency on the part of the lender to liquidate to clear the outstanding debt.
It always seems a shame that despite what I thought was a clear blog post the NZ Herald still wants to interpret this data as “Mortgagee Sales” under the headline of “Mortgagee sales drop“