The Unconditional Blog

Queenstown Lakes / Central Otago Property Pulse factsheet – November 2011

Posted on: December 19th, 2011 | Filed in Queenstown Lakes Property Market Factsheet

The Queenstown Lakes district region property pulse factsheet for November 2011 is published using data from Realestate.co.nz and REINZ (Real Estate Institute of NZ).

Property sales across the Queenstown Lake and Central Otago region at 85 rose on a seasonally adjusted basis in November and were up 13% as compared to a year ago. The inventory of unsold houses on the market at 105 weeks rose slightly but still remains in line with the long-term average of 105 weeks of equivalent sales.

Median sales price of properties sold in the Queenstown Lakes and Central Otago region at $405,000 was down 4% as compared to a year ago, this continues a steady fall in prices through the year. The asking price expectation of new listings fell by 13% as compared to a year ago at $507,028.

The level of new listings coming onto the market in November at 293 fell as compared to prior month and was up just 8% as compared to a year ago.

Otago Property Pulse factsheet – November 2011

Posted on: December 19th, 2011 | Filed in Otago Property Market Factsheet

The Otago region property pulse factsheet for November 2011 is published using data from Realestate.co.nz and REINZ (Real Estate Institute of NZ).

Property sales in the Otago region at 253 in the month rose slightly on a seasonally adjusted basis in November but were down 3% as compared to a year ago. The inventory of unsold houses on the market slipped slightly 28 weeks, this level remains in line with the long-term average of 28 weeks of equivalent sales.

Median sales price of properties sold in the Otago region at $245,000 was up 7% as compared to a year ago, and continues a slow but steady rise through the year. The asking price expectation of new listings remained steady as compared to the prior month as shows a 3% rise as compared to a year ago at $280,378.

The level of new listings coming onto the market in November at 481 was well up on October, and was down just1% as compared to a year ago.

Southland Property Pulse factsheet – November 2011

Posted on: December 19th, 2011 | Filed in Southland Property Market Factsheet

The Southland region property pulse factsheet for November 2011 is published using data from Realestate.co.nz and REINZ (Real Estate Institute of NZ).

Property sales in Southland at 139 in the month were when seen on a seasonally adjusted basis flat for the past 4 months. The sales were up 11% as compared to a year ago. The inventory of unsold houses on the market remained stable at 39 weeks of equivalent sales, sitting steady above the long term average thereby indicating a slight favour towards buyers in the market, The long-term average inventory is 32 weeks of equivalent sales.

Median sales price at $196,000 slipped slightly from October, and was up 4% as compared to a year ago. The asking price expectation of new listings was down 2% as compared to a year ago at $223,790.

The level of new listings coming onto the market in November at 327 rose steeply as compared to October and was up 11% as compared to a year ago.

Mobile usage for finding property reaches a new milestone

Posted on: December 14th, 2011 | Filed in Featured, International, mobile

All of us here at Realestate.co.nz are delighted to see the mobile apps for both iPhone and Android blast through the 50,000 download mark this week.

It was just over a year ago when we launched the iPhone app – the first in NZ and the only app with GPS location based property search. A year later and we continue to be surprised and delighted by the uptake and usage which now approaches 14% of all visitor traffic to our listings from the mobile platform.

The appeal of this method of property discovery has been turbocharged in the past couple of months as the summer peak property season has arrived. The month of October saw the highest ever level of downloads with over 6,000 in the month, greatly assisted by the new Android version of the app (another first) in late September. The level of downloads continues with over 200 new downloads per day providing the users with the experience of discovering the convenience and addictive appeal of this app.

Not only are people downloading the app in ever increasing numbers but they are engaging with it more often. Over 2,000 visitors a day check out property for sale and rent whilst on the go – at the cafe, in front of the TV, at open homes.

The app is so comprehensive and so appealing. With the largest selection of listings by licensed agents, usage appeals to the serious property hunter keen to be better informed and in control of the property searching process. Over 90% of users are returning users and unlike the web which is very heavily focused to casual image based browsing the mobile app is all about property information and insight in the palm of your hand.

We have been interested to see just how keen kiwi’s are relative to other countries in regard to uptake and usage of property apps on the the smartphone. Instead of comparing downloads by country (which is tricky as not many other websites publish their data) we chose to use the ranking of the various apps in their respective iTunes app store. Clearly this just seeks to identify the iPhone platform, but this has been the consistent largest platform across all international markets for property apps.

We chose six countries to compare against NZ from Australia and the US / Canada as well as Europe. What we found was very interesting. The Realestate.co.nz property app is the 16th most popular free lifestyle app in NZ, and the 209th most popular free app. Out of interest if you exclude the free “gaming” apps from the rankings the Realestate.co.nz property app jumps up to be the 41st most popular free iPhone app in NZ.

By comparison to NZ; Sweden appears to have the most popular iPhone property app from Hemnet coming in as the 8th most popular free lifestyle app in Sweden, and the 104th most popular free app overall.

Next comes Australia where the Realestate.com.au app comes in as the 11th most popular free lifestyle app and the 127th most popular free app. That then places NZ in third slot amongst these 7 countries. Next comes Canada almost equal to NZ with their Realtor app ranked as the 16th most popular free lifestyle apps and 239th place overall for free apps in Canada. After these four come the the French app from Seloger, the US app from Zillow, and the UK app from Rightmove.

Floorplans add a true sense of a virtual open home to the website

Posted on: December 7th, 2011 | Filed in Buying / Selling a home, Featured, Website news

The presentation of property online has radically transformed over the past 5 years.

Back in 2006 when the new website of Realestate.co.nz emerged to provide a much improved user experience, the content provided on the site was by today’s standards pitiful. On average a listing had only 3 photos. The property seldom had an address, and the description was often copied from the newspaper advert. At the time the real estate industry in general judged the web as an after-thought, with the central focus being on print advertising in newspapers and magazines.

Skip forward 5 years to today and so much has changed. Today the first destination for almost all property seekers is online, on average property seekers spend over 3 hours a week on property websites. Their intent is to spend even more time in the future with more than a third of them say they will check out property online more frequently. (This data comes from the recent Nielsen online intercept survey carried out in July this year).

As this exponential growth of viewing property online has transformed the real estate industry; so at the same time the industry has adapted and recognised the need to provide more information with each listing. The average number of photos per listing has shot up to 16. The photos have got bigger, and to accommodate these we have added full screen viewing. Today more than 65% of all listings now have an address which allows property maps to be included on the website providing great context to the property location.

These improvements fit perfectly into the wish list of users of real estate websites as identified in the Nielsen survey – the table below tracks the most requested information presented on a real estate website:

Nestled firmly below the expected critical information on property listings – the address, the large portfolio of high quality images and maps is the desire for floor plans. 89% of those surveyed stated that they would like to see floorplans for properties on the market.

That request has now been answered on the realestate.co.nz website. Working with partners such as MyAgent and Open2view we have enabled the integration of interactive floor plans for properties on the market today on the website. These solutions which go further than just static image based floor plans adding in the context of the location for each images matched to the part of the house really add engagement to these listings which is so important for getting the maximum impact for the vendor’s property.

At this time this service of interactive floorplans on the realestate.co.nz is the unique in NZ and with several hundred listings already on the site featuring these floorplans, and more to come in the near future, we certainly see this as a compelling appeal of the website. Check out the example of a few current listing:

A New Zealand housing bubble?

Posted on: December 6th, 2011 | Filed in Featured, International, Money Matters

The question has been posed today in the media that NZ properties are overvalued by 25% – according to a report from the Economist entitled “House of Horrors“. It should be pointed out that this report was reported by Interest.co.nz a couple of weeks ago.

The Ecomomist’s report is certainly worth reading, as well is the data which lies behind the report for it shows that the headline of a 25% overvaluation for NZ property is hard to identify. The full table of data is presented here. It should be noted that The Economist cites Statistics NZ as the source of the data for the report.

The report states that “Based on the average of the two measures (analysis of value to rents & value to income), home prices are overvalued by about 25% or more in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden“.

The specific data for NZ shows that when assessed on the value to rents NZ is 66% overvalued, whilst when assessed on value to income NZ property is just 4% overvalued. Australia by comparison is 38% overvalued when assessed to income and 53% overvalued to rents.

The UK is judged to be 20% overvalued when assessed to income and 28% overvalued to rents, with the US 22% undervalued when assessed to income and 8% undervalued to rents.

The chart also highlights that NZ property is showing a 0.1% increase in price as compared to last year and a 4% fall since 2007. Whilst the countries cited in the headline such as Belgium, Canada and France have seen year on year increases of over 3% up to 7.7% and increases since 2007 of between 6% and 22%.

The Economist provides as part of the data report an excellent interactive chart. This has given me the opportunity to analysing some great comparatives of both property prices and value comparatives which I have detailed below.

Comparing property prices on an index basis since 2000 shows the relative position for NZ matched to Australia and the US. All three countries enjoyed rapid growth through the first 6 years of the decade before the US started its spiral down, over the past 4 years NZ has flatlined whilst Australia has forged ahead.

The analysis of property prices based on real terms rather than actual price as in the index chart is very illuminating – this chart which shows NZ and Australia highlights the fact that the current property prices in real terms are back to where they were in the Q2 of 2005 – over 6 years ago – such is the inflation impact on property prices. By comparison Australian property prices in real terms are 20% up as compared to Q2 of 2005.

The Economist report made comparison of valuation to both income and rental and these next 2 charts present the data for NZ and Australia against these two measures. Based on income NZ Property prices are now around 17% overvalued compared to the status in 2000, by comparison Australia is 42% overvalued. NZ and Australia were tracking on a comparable basis up until the last 2 years when NZ has fallen as a ratio of price to income.

The comparison of property prices to rents for NZ and Australia shows a chart where the two markets are exactly aligned comparing Q1 2000 with the current data – both are showing a 60% appreciation of prices to rents over the period, with both markets tracking in line through the period.

As a final analysis it is interesting to compare NZ with two markets that has fared the worst in the property crash of the last decade – the US and Ireland. In this chart showing property prices in real terms the NZ property prices in real terms are up just over 50% in the 11 years, by comparison both Ireland and the US have seen the bubble followed by the crash which in both cases shows that property prices in real terms are back to 2000 levels – a lost decade for these property markets.

NZ Property Report – November 2011

Posted on: December 1st, 2011 | Filed in Featured, NZ Property Report

The November 2011 NZ Property Report published by Realestate.co.nz provides an insight into the state of the New Zealand property market as measured by the supply side of the property market over the month of November. The key measures of the market analysed in the report are the number of new listings, the asking price expectation for those new listings and the level of inventory of unsold houses on the market at this time. The report is compiled from data captured by the website and represents close to 95% of all property movements in the NZ market as managed by licensed real estate agents.

A full print version of the NZ Property Report – November 2011 is published below and is available for download (1.5MB) and distribution.

Summary of the market – November 2011

The property market is now firmly in the active Summer season with a strong surge of new listings coming onto the market to provide variety for the prospective buyers who have certainly been more active over the winter and spring period of this year. This current level of activity is likely to result in full calendar year sales in excess of 60,000. This would be up 7% on the prior year; however this level of sales is far below the peak of the property market (now a somewhat distant memory) of 2004 when in excess of 120,000 properties were sold in that year.

The slightly lower level of listings in October are now judged to have been influenced by the Rugby World Cup with sellers possibly hesitant to list at that time preferring to wait until the event was over before marketing their properties. It is still though noticeable the extent to which this year has seen a much lower level of new listings than 2010, so far this year 116,016 new listings have been brought to market 11% lower than last year.

With this new flow of listings has come what can be considered to be a confident position by sellers on asking price; which whilst slipping slightly in the month continues to show a slow but steady increase over the past few years. This confidence on the part of sellers is certainly supported by the rate of sale of property which is being shared by real estate agents in their daily contact with the public, and can also be seen in traffic to online listing sites which has seen an aggregated increase this year of 6% with over 187,000 daily visitor sessions across all sites (Nielsen Online).

Asking Price

The truncated mean asking price of $425,956 for all new listings in November eased slightly from the peak in October of $434,161. On a seasonally adjusted basis the asking price fell 2% indicating that whilst expectations are rising the rate of increase is not as high as seasonal factors would expect.

The long term trend as seen in the chart has been a steady increase in asking price over the past 3 years – the seasonal trend each year tends to see asking prices rise through from mid winter to October before falling back.

New Listings

The level of new listings coming onto the market in November rose on a seasonally adjusted basis by 17%. A total of 13,369 new listings came onto the market representing a 3% year-on-year rise.

On a 12 month moving total basis the number of new listings in the past year totals 124,412 as compared 140,214 for the same period a year ago – a fall of 11%.

Inventory

The level of unsold houses on the market at the end of November turned down slightly in what was a somewhat unexpected trend. At the end of the month there were 48,647 houses, apartments and lifestyle properties on the market barely up from 46,597 in October and down from 54,365 a year ago. This current level of inventory represents 38.1 weeks of equivalent sales.

Regional Summary – Asking price expectations

The national truncated mean asking price expectation among sellers eased slightly in November to $425,956. This price trend has been seen for each of the past 4 years as rising asking prices begin to ease as the summer approaches.

Across the 19 regions the view is generally of increasing prices with 12 regions reporting increases as measured against the recent 3 month average. There were 3 regions with rises of over 5% – Hawkes Bay, Nelson and the West Coast, the latter of these reporting a new record high up 25% over the prior year to $315,993.

Amongst the 7 regions showing a fall in asking price there were 4 regions where the fall was over 5% – Northland, Gisborne, Manawatu / Wanganui and Southland. The largest of these falls was in Gisborne which saw asking price fall by 29% vs. November last year, this level at $260,189 is approaching a record low last seen in early 2009.

Regional Summary – Listings

New listings rose across most of the country in November with just 5 of the 19 regions seeing falls in listings of greater than 5%. The biggest fall was in the Coromandel which was down 29% with just 247 new listings, this compares with levels of over 400 in prior years.

Contrasting these regions were Nelson reporting 24% increase, Northland with a 46% increase and the Central North Island with an enormous 120% increase – this latter region has seen a consistently low level of new listings this year. In the first 10 months of this year only 1,284 listings came onto the market, whilst 296 new listing hit the market in the single month of November.

The remainder of the country seems to reflect a balance with 6 regions reporting barely changed levels of new listings which would indicate a balance between buyers and sellers.

Regional Summary – Inventory

The inventory of unsold homes on the market eased slightly this month having seen a slight upturn in October; given the rise in new listings this would indicate a strong rate of sale.

Across the country there were a total of 8 regions where the advantage is to sellers. Of these the 5 regions of Auckland, Manawatu/Wanganui, Canterbury, West Coast and the Waikato remain very much in strong sellers markets. If anything the past month has seen a degree of rebalancing of the market overall in all but these extreme market-condition-affected regions.

There are however still 5 regions (Marlborough, Wairarapa, Southland, Taranaki and Gisborne) were the market is certainly favouring buyers with high levels of inventory set against long term average.

The market is now firmly in the peak summer season and with the more balanced market in terms of inventory of unsold properties on the market the options seem more open for both active buyers and sellers.

Lifestyle

Lifestyle property listings shot up in November with 1,133 listings in the month, this represented a 15% seasonally adjusted increase but was down 5% on the same month last year. The truncated mean asking price at $574,507 was up 3% from last year but down 3% down on the recent 3 month average.

Across the country strength in new listings was seen in Northland (125, up 67% Yr. on Yr.) and the Waikato (120, up 13% Yr. on Yr.). Whilst the Bay of Plenty, Hawkes Bay and Wellington all saw year on year falls of over 25%.

Apartments

New listings for apartments picked up in November with 535 apartments coming onto the market up 20% from October but 10% down on last year. The truncated mean asking price of $370,532 was up 2% from prior month and in line with last year.

The Auckland market which dominates the apartment market saw a stronger performance with 350 new listings which was 25% up on prior month and just 1.4% down on last year. The asking price was $352,407 which was up nearly 15% on last year and 2% up from October.

Notes:

Truncated mean

The monthly asking price for new listings presented in this report utilises the measure of ‘truncated mean’. This measure is judged to be a more accurate measure of the market price than average price as it statistically removes the extremes that exist within any property market that can so easily introduce a skew to traditional average price figures.

The truncated mean used in this report removes the upper 10% and the lower 10% of listings in each data set. An average or mean of the balance of listings is then calculated.

Methodology

With the largest database of properties for sale in NZ, realestate.co.nz is uniquely placed to immediately identify any changes in the marketplace. The realestate.co.nz NZ Property Report is compiled from new listings coming onto the market from the more than 1,000 licensed real estate offices across NZ, representing more than 95% of all offices.

With an average monthly level of over 10,000 new listings, the realestate.co.nz NZ Property Report provides the largest monthly sample report on the residential property market, as well as a more timely view of the property market than any other property report. The data is collated and analysed at the close of each month, and the Report is compiled for the 1st day of the following month. This provides a feedback mechanism as to the immediate state of the market, well in advance of sales statistics, which by the very nature of the selling process can reflect activity with a lag of between 2 and 4 months.

In analysing the details of the 13,369 new listings in the month of November, a total of 138 listings have been excluded due to anomalies. The land area of the property defines the categorisation of Lifestyle property. The criterion is a property having in excess of 0.3 hectares and being situated outside metropolitan areas.

Background to Realestate.co.nz

Realestate.co.nz is the official website company of the real estate industry of New Zealand, it is an industry owned web business providing online marketing services to the real estate industry. The shareholders in the business comprise the REINZ (50%) and six of the largest real estate companies (50%).

The business operates a portfolio of websites all focused to specialist sectors of the real estate market:

Realestate.co.nz is the heart of the business and is focused to the residential property market. It features the most comprehensive selection of property for sale and rent across NZ. The website attracts a significant monthly audience of over 400,000 unique browsers, with over 110,000 of those visiting from countries outside of NZ.

nzFarms is a specialist website presenting the most comprehensive selection of farms and agricultural businesses on the market across NZ. At this time it features around 5,000 listings for all types of farms and agricultural land as well as over 11,000 lifestyle properties.

Prime Commercial is a specialist website presenting the most comprehensive selection of commercial property for purchase or lease on the market across NZ. At this time it features over 27,000 listings for all types of properties – retail, commercial, industrial and investment properties.

Prime Business is a specialist website presenting the most comprehensive selection of businesses for sale on the market across NZ. At this time it features over 4,300 listings for all types of businesses – retail, tourism, wholesale as well as franchise opportunities.

Zoodle is a specialist property information website providing very detailed data on all residential properties in NZ. The database comprises over 1.6m properties with detailed specifications, map and local amenities. The site provides online reports for free and for purchase covering valuation and legal information to greatly assist the needs of property buyers and sellers.

The web business of Realestate.co.nz site is the most comprehensive real estate web operation in NZ, currently hosting over 110,000 listings, covering this portfolio of residential property for sale and rent, commercial property for sale and lease, rural properties and farms, as well as businesses for sale. With a subscriber base of over 1,000 offices, the company represents over 95% of all listings from licensed real estate agents in NZ.

The full NZ Property Report for November 2011 can be downloaded here (1.5MB pdf document). Additionally the raw data is accessible here as an Excel spreadsheet enabling anyone to analyse the raw data and establish any trends or observations.

Usage rights are governed under attribution to the source of the data being Realestate.co.nz. The next NZ Property Report for December 2011 will be published on this website on Sunday 1st January 2012 at 10am.

Property Pulse – October 2011

Posted on: November 29th, 2011 | Filed in Featured, Property Pulse - Regional Market Report

Each month we publish a factsheet for each region of the country as well as a national report to provide an insight to the key numbers that detail the health of the property market across the country.

These reports for the month of October cover all 16 provincial regions as well as reports covering the 3 main metropolitan regions of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. The Auckland report is divided up into each of the main metro areas (North Shore, Waitakere, Manukau as well as Auckland City).

Each factsheet provides the key numbers in table and chart form using the key statistics from the Real Estate Institute of NZ and Realestate.co.nz. This provides the number of property sales in the month, the median sales price for those property sales, the inventory of unsold properties on the market, as well as the number and the asking price expectation of new listings brought onto the market in the month.

Metropolitan Areas

Provincial Areas

National Property Pulse

The national NZ property pulse factsheet for October 2011 is published using data from Realestate.co.nz and REINZ (Real Estate Institute of NZ).

Property sales across the country totalled 5,007 in the month showed a fall on a seasonally adjusted basis in October and a significant 28% rise as compared to October 2010. The inventory of unsold houses on the market at 38 weeks of equivalent sales continues to sit below the long-term average of 41 weeks.

The stratified mean sales price for property sales across the country at $368,200 is up 3% as compared to a year ago, and continues to show slow but steady rise over the past year. The asking price expectation of new listings rose to a new peak in October of $434,161, which is 3% up as compared to a year ago.

The level of new listings coming onto the market in October at 11,312 was up very slightly from the prior month and down 5% as compared to a year ago.

Northland Property Pulse factsheet – October 2011

Posted on: November 29th, 2011 | Filed in Northland Property Market Factsheet

The Northland region property pulse factsheet for October 2011 is published using data from Realestate.co.nz and REINZ (Real Estate Institute of NZ).

Property sales in Northland at 102 in the month fell significantly on a seasonally adjusted basis in October and is below the levels of a year ago. The inventory of unsold houses on the market at 128 weeks is in line with long-term average at 130 weeks of equivalent sales.

Median sales price for property sales in Northland at $292,500 is down 7% as compared to a year ago and continues a declining trend from the prior 6 months. The asking price expectation of new listings rose in October to $410,736, whilst still the same level as compared to a year ago.

The level of new listings coming onto the market in October at 622 was up significantly from September and up a significant 31% as compared to a year ago.

Auckland region Property Pulse factsheet – October 2011

Posted on: November 29th, 2011 | Filed in Auckland Property Market Factsheet

The Auckland region property pulse factsheet for October 2011 is published using data from Realestate.co.nz and REINZ (Real Estate Institute of NZ).

Property sales across the Auckland region at 1,804 in the month fell on a seasonally adjusted basis in October and were up 36% on October 2010. The inventory of unsold houses rose to 27.2 weeks, having fallen over recent months to below the long-term average of 33 weeks of equivalent sales.

The stratified mean sales price at $500,750 rose 7% as compared to a year ago and fairly stable as it has climbed for the past 10 months. The asking price expectation of new listings also rose to $568,778 up 6% as compared to a year ago.

The level of new listings coming onto the market across the Auckland region in October at 3,796 fell 3% as compared to a year ago.

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