Auckland house prices ‘stubbornly high’: Up by 2.6%, Barfoot & Thompson figures reveal

Auckland house prices remains “stubbornly high”, despite winter and the Government’s crackdown on property investors.

Sale prices by Auckland’s largest agency Barfoot & Thompson were up 2.6 per cent in the last month to make annual rises 21.9 per cent.

The average price paid was $1,143,328, up 2.6 per cent on May and the median price at $1,109,000 was up 3.4 percent, the company said today.

The onset of winter and the new regulations aimed at making home buying less attractive to investors did not dampen the price, or the number of Auckland houses sold in June, it said.

“Normally in June sales numbers start to edge lower, but this year we sold 1243 homes, up 3.8 percent on those for the previous month, and both the average and median prices paid were higher than those for May,” said managing director Peter Thompson.

“Even though our new listings for the month at 1485 were solid, at month end our total listings at 2864 were the lowest at a month end for five years.

“Demand and competition for homes has never been higher and the number of homes we had for sale at the end of the month was down by a quarter on the number available at the same time last year,” Thompson said.

“The rate at which prices are increasing did ease slightly in June but the rate remains stubbornly high.”

The agency’s supply of houses for sale has fallen lately, from this year’s high of 3416 available listings in February to just 2864 in June.

Sale prices rose from January’s $1.06m to $1.11 in April and May and now $1.14.

Now, 90 per cent of its sales are for more than $500,000, 84 per cent are for $750,000 or over and 71 per cent are $1m or more.

Last week, CoreLogic said it had noticed some signs of the market possibly beginning to cool.

Values rose only 1.8 per cent in June compared to May’s 2.2 per cent.

Nick Goodall, research head, said that provided “early evidence of a gentle deceleration in market momentum.

“The rate of growth in June slowed in 12 of New Zealand’s 18 largest markets, with a further three recording a drop in values over the month. In Gisborne, where values increased 35 per cent in the past 12 months, there was a surprising change of direction with a fall in value of -0.9 per cent over June,” he said.

The exceptional growth in the last year was not sustainable, particularly with increased deposit requirements, market uncertainty driven by Government regulation and the prospect of higher interest rates.

The Treasury is expecting house price growth between 2021 and 2022 to be 0.9 per cent.

Treasury says house prices are expected to be roughly 16 per cent lower than they would have been in 2025, if the Government had not implemented a range of housing announcements this year: a $3.8 billion housing infrastructure, an extension of the bright-line test and the scrapping of the interest deductibility programme.

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