High End Sales Lift Average Auckland House Values

October 5, 2011

High End Sales Lift Average Auckland House Values

Bringing Spring forward ‘one month’ has contributed to the significant lift in the average selling price of Auckland homes in September which reached $547,883, the highest monthly average price for six months.

“The September average sales price was up more than $16,000 or 3.2 percent on that for August, and up $24,000 or 4.9 percent ahead of that for the same month last year,” said Peter Thompson, Managing Director of Barfoot & Thompson.

“This represents a significant price increase given that for the past four months the average price moved no more than $2000 from $529,000 to $531,000.

“Traditionally prices rise at the start of spring, and in anticipation that the hype around rugby might interfere with our normal spring promotions, we brought our marketing campaigns forward by a month.

“Certainly as a result of that a number of sellers actively sought to list earlier than they might have otherwise done.

“In September the top end of the market was extremely active, and we sold 6 homes in excess of $2 million and another 45 in excess of $1 million.

“The number of homes sold in excess of $1 million represented 17 percent of all our sales by value for the month, which is a far greater proportion of sales than normal.

“You have to go back to March (when the average selling price peaked for the year at $581,000) to find a higher average monthly selling price.

“The majority of these high value homes were in the central city, eastern suburbs, Devonport and North Shore beachline.”

Mr Thompson said that while the average sales price was up, the number of sales for the month at 738 was in line with the number sold for the last two months.

“We continue to sell more homes on a monthly basis than we did last year, but sales numbers have remained in a tight band between 778 and 738 for the last three months.

“New listings at 1263 were up 5 percent for the same month last year, and for the second month in a row new listings exceeded 1200.

“New listings remain tight and at the end of the month we had only 4798 homes on our books, 36 more homes than last month’s number, which was our lowest on record for four years.”

Barfoot & Thompson knows Auckland best. It is the city’s leading real estate company, selling around one in three Auckland residential homes, significantly ahead of all other competitor brands. For further information visit www.barfoot.co.nz

ENDS

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