Real Estate market shows early spring buds!
The latest sales report for July issued this week by REINZ reflected what was clearly being talked about around the country by agents who are close to the business – transactions were being made, property has been selling and interest from buyers is clearly there.
The graph below tracks the annualised sales, together with the annualised value of the residential market since 1993, whilst on first glance its shows a bleak position, there are good signs.
Estimated total transactions for 2008 look to be around the 60,000 to 70,000 properties – pretty much the level of sales a decade ago. The sharp decline in sales which started almost a year ago is likely to be behind us as we head into the spring. As for prices the median price for July showed no change and this was reflected in the July figures published for Barfoot & Thompson for the Auckland region which shows that despite the media hype we are not as yet (and may in fact not) witnessing catastrophic property price falls across the board.
The sales statistics reflects the transactions undertaken in July, based on buyer interest in May and June, the beauty of the web is that information is available on today’s market now. This data can provide a key pointer to where the market is likely to head in the next quarter. The level of web traffic across all real estate websites remains pretty stable at or slightly ahead of last year as shown by the red line on the graph below.
What I think is very interesting and potentially far more exciting for this coming spring is the level of email enquiry from realestate.co.nz. I have analysed the statistics of the number of emails we sent to agents over the past 2 years and plotted it on the graph below.
What this shows is that on an indexed basis the level of email enquiries being generated from the website started to pick up in late May and has accelerated enormously since then to a level far above the relative level of enquiry last year, this I feel is a great indicator of growing interest in the property market again. Let’s hope these enquiries that you are receiving turn into valuable leads and sales – this is a really important time to make sure you are getting these emails, we send on average up to a thousand emails to agents everyday – have you had one this week?
August 14 2008 | Market stats | 4 Comments »
