Barfoot & Thompson's February's sales suggest the Auckland housing market may be in for a disappointing summer, with a drop in both sales numbers and median price, and a surge in unsold stock.
The real estate agency, the biggest in Auckland, sold 685 residential properties in February. That was down from 700 in January, but up from 633 in February last year. This could probably be best described as a fairly lacklustre start to what is traditionally the busiest time of the year for residential real estate.
The median selling price also took a dip, down to $930,000 in February from $950,000 in January, and well down from $970,000 in February last year.
Barfoot's median selling price has now declined for the last three consecutive months and is $310,000 below its November 2021 peak.
However, Barfoot's average selling price increased to $1,107,006 in February compared to $1,053,446 in January, suggesting sales may have been stronger at the top end of the market compared to the bottom for the start of the year.
The most likely reason for February's underwhelming sales was the huge amount of stock Barfoot's is carrying.
The agency had 5997 residential properties available for sale at the end of February, the most it has had in any month of the year since 2011, putting stock levels.at a 14 year high.
That was in spite of the fact that 2073 new listings were received in February, which was down by 8.1% compared to February last year.
That suggests the buyer's market is still firmly in place over summer, with many properties languishing on the market.
Barfoot's February report characterised February's sales performance as "a quiet month's trading."
"New listings for the month at 2073 were solid, and a combination of new builds and occupied dwellings," Barfoot & Thompson Managing Director Peter Thompson said.
"At month's end we had 5997 properties on our books, the highest number for 14 years."
"A major contributor to the level of new listings is the continued number of new builds currently being made available for sale," he said.
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"At month's end we had 5997 properties on our books, the highest number for 14 years."
"A major contributor to the level of new listings is the continued number of new builds currently being made available for sale," he said.
there is no way to polish this turd, prices fall this year, 5-10%.this year, with downside risk.
Some will give it a go, only to unravel the misery lying beneath..
There is no end in sight to the plight of the depressed housing market..
Any amount of polishing of these numbers, will not hide the fact that housing is overpriced and will continue it's decline over a couple of years
Were Barfoot's results lead indicator for REINZ last month? Same again?
Hopefully not as I was assured the bottom was in last Sep, and Oct, and Nov, and Dec and Jan and Feb ...
RIP Rookie, TheMan et al.
Their medium price was lead indicator for Auckland.
I suggest their unsold backlog is as well.
You are watching an ACCELERATION in the Auckland correction here.
The median selling price also took a dip, down to $930,000 in February from $950,000 in January, and well down from $970,000 in February last year.
Auckland medium house price falls $714 a day in February...
A plight for many that bet their earnings on the house..
The great and long overdue reset endures. Spare a thought for the overly eager who bought in pure fear that August 2023, October 2023, August 2024 then Christmas 2024 was the last chance to buy......
Barfoot's median selling price has now declined for the last three consecutive months and is $310,000 below its November 2021 peak.
30 Year term 5% PA Principal repaid: $310,000 Interest + fees paid: $289,040 Total amount paid: $599,040
That's $1,664 per month or $19,968 PA FOR THE NEXT 30 YEARS
or as TTP would say, no one on here regrets paying 20k more a year... for the next 30 years.
YEAH RIGHT
by tothepoint | 1st Mar 25, 10:31am; "Brace yourselves, doomy gloomies .......You're in for a rude shock.
Uh-huh..... 🤣😂
Looking increasingly like further decline. Who can bail the speculative out..? Youth have woken up to the overshoot of the housing scam and are just exiting in droves. They will pay a lifetime of much needed tax elsewhere, a huge loss in much needed workforce and taxation.
All we need is some gigantic black swan event and the banks will have to act. Or perhaps an Orange Swan...
Amazing how a ponzi unravels when the masses realise it is their belief and buy-in that keeps the house of cards up.
Yes I’ve done a reasonable amount of reading on behavioural finance/economics by the likes of Kahneman/Shiller/Akerloff.
Most people seem to take little or no consideration for the way human emotion can drive asset prices far higher that what should be rational and the same in the opposite direction if greed becomes fear.
Shiller and Akerloffs book ‘Animal Spirits - How human psychology drives the economy’ (https://www.amazon.com.au/Animal-Spirits-Psychology-Economy-Capitalism/…) is a really good book for anyone wishing to explore this area.
We’ve just experienced a few decades of quite extreme greed in our housing market but everyone has conceptualised this as a ‘new normal’ - but it is not. It has been greed based upon the expectation that prices wil always be higher next month so you have to rush to buy now or pay more in the future. That greed could turn to real fear if people realise the assets they own may not be worth anything near what they think they are or people see a new trend emerging where actually you can wait 3 months and buy the house you are after for even less - I don’t think we are at that point just yet - but we aren’t far from a tipping point that could lead to extreme fear if prices don’t stop dropping the see next 3-6 months or so and where the common narrative is ‘why buy now when I can wait 3 months and buy the same house for $50k less?’
We’ve just experienced a few decades of quite extreme greed in our housing market
I can't personally view it as greed, so much as it was the most profitable given the tax system of the era and relative price of housing. Those who benefitted most educated themselves and learned that it was the least risk with the highest return, even though the rules were slowly amended dover time around ring fencing etc that took some of the steam off the cashflow, however which was outweighed by ongoing capital gains. then again how much is greed vs financial sense? 1 extra property? 5, 10, 40? either way, it isn't very profitable now to buy into, but those with a portfolio who have low to no mortgages across the board will still continue to profit extensively through previous financial decisions.
Not sure I agree - otherwise one would argue that nearly all asset bubbles are logical/rational behaviour.
Nearly all are caused by people wanting more than what they need (more or less the definition of greed).
“Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless” source = Ancient scrolls
Nobody forced people to buy more houses than they need for their own personal use nor to take on more debt than was sensible to do so - for many they did so based upon a desire for greater wealth (ie greed). Almost all asset bubbles are the same in this respect when that state of consciousness becomes the common consensus of a society towards a particular asset (be it houses, stocks or tulips).
Tomorrow's headline...
Barfoot's average selling price increased to $1,107,006 in February compared to $1,053,446 in January
Meanwhile in Cloudland "investors" are cooking up quite a storm....
That's the way OneWoof will report it.
Hard to look over a 5% return over 1 month...
yes but you wanted to overlook the 50k fall last month, you called it noise....
Spruiker accounting, only count the wins, never mark to market losses
speaking of which, what's your kiwi saver looking like?
S&P 500 suffers worst loss of 2025 on tariffs and Nvidia-fueled sell-off
The S&P 500 tumbled 1.8%, its worst loss of 2025, as markets were hit with a vicious one-two punch of the continued plunge in momentum stocks and a real wake-up call on the reality of President Donald Trump’s trade policy. The Nasdaq 100 gave back 2.2% while the Russell 2000 slumped 2.8%.
Energy was the worst-performing sector amid OPEC+’s slightly surprising decision to begin returning oil to the market next month. Tech wasn’t too far behind. Some sources of relief on the tape were the typically defensive sectors: real estate, consumer staples, healthcare, and, to a lesser extent, utilities.
NvidiaNVDA $114.55 (-8.73%) tanked nearly 9% amid a chorus of bearish commentary from Goldman Sachs’ market desk, closing at its lowest level of 2025.
IntelINTC $22.80 (-4.05%) initially surged after reports that Nvidia and Broadcom were exploring the idea of becoming customers to make advanced chips, but gave up all those gains and then some.
Sunnova EnergyNOVA $0.60 (-64.25%) lost nearly two-thirds of its value after issuing the dreaded “going concern” notice.
The gains that various cryptocurrencies enjoyed after this weekend’s declaration of a Crypto Strategic Reserve all faded amid the sell-off in risk assets.
Not sure what the S&P has to do with it...
I've never denied falls in prices... the comment was tounge n cheek - calm down.
The median appears to be the lowest since Sept 2020. In fairness there is a lot of seasonality in the B&T figures. More young couples (first home owners) sell/buy at the end of the school year which brings the median down. But if you compare to Feb 2020 there it has grown by 13% - or compounding at about 2% per annum. Which fits with a model that, if you take Covid-crazy out house prices are increasing at about half the rate of inflation.
And yet people have come to the expectation that house prices always rise around 7% pa (ie double every 10 years) while the central banks wants inflation/wages rising at less than half than that. But none seem to see how this is in the long term impossible to sustain when house price growth is a sum of the future discounted cash flows which are constrained by wage/rent growth. Ie if we have inflation at 2% long term it is impossible for house prices to rise at 7% if the discount rate is stable (let alone goes up).
For those with the know how of how to do so, open up a spreadsheet and run the cash flow analysis with cash flows/rents/wages rising at 2% with a flat discount rate and see what growth you get in asset price. I did this around 2021-2022 and it indicated that with flat discount rates (ie mortgage rates) house prices were over priced around 40%.
The 7% growth we’ve experienced in recent decades, while the central bank aims to keep general inflation at 2%, has only been possible by having a discount rate that is always falling (ie 1980 - 2021) and now it appears we have broken out of that 40 year trend of falling interest rates - see US 10 year yield using a long term x-axis (ie 100 years)
100% spot on IO.
The Ponziland of forever mega housing gains stopped "Dead in the Water in 2021" and the hull is holed irrepairably.....with interest rates now risked much more to upside, than the downside.|
Those Dinosaur Specuvestors that have not spotted the initial signs of the Ponzi burning comet incoming to burn and evisorate that Borrowed and Gambled cash.....well hey, we all need to learn lessons in life, now dont we!
I think even flat mortgage rates from here are going to be difficult to sustain current house prices. Be interesting to see how far central banks cut from here. Swaps 2 year and greater seem to be more or less flat but perhaps still a little downside in the shorter duration.
Not sure if technical analysis counts for a housing market, but looking at the charts above for median pricing it would appear that another month of falling data could see a trend established downward to the next support level - which looks to me to be around the $800k mark ie another 10% + down from current prices.
If I were a FHB in Auckland and time wasn’t an issue (or family children needs etc) I’d wait a few months to see where this is going as you might save yourself another 100K on a 30 year mortgage and/or be able to buy a much better house with the deposit you have saved.
Buying yesterday isn’t always the best (financial) decision - even though this is the opposite of the views of the property hype train who financial benefit themselves from stirring up FOMO in order to suck buyers in now (ie ‘be quick or you’ll miss out’ - can remember people saying this the past 2-3 years and as you can see it has been complete bollocks - waiting over this period has been extremely financially benefiting those who have patiently waited).
Just as an anecdote, my personal watch list on trademe has been getting flooded with new listings and daily updates after Xmas with reduced prices (often around 5% drop in asking price) and houses just sitting there not selling. So I don’t think there needs to be a rush to buy for those considering doing so.
Somehow Nelson/Tasman seems to be holding out, but I wonder for how long. The data gets skewed as Tasman has a lot of higher valued houses with high floor area and larger sections.
For last four weeks been to weekly open home of a property I'm interested in. Few viewers and today(last open) I was only one there. Auction in couple of weeks. In days past it would be well out of my league, at the moment frustratingly close. Lets see how the auction goes?
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