"unprecedented" month sees auckland market break records

Photo: Craigsydnz

An "unprecedented" month of sales saw the Auckland property market break several records in March.

Agent Barfoot & Thompson sold 1,597 homes in March 2015, the highest number they have ever recorded in a calendar month.

"March is always the most active month for property sales, but there has never been a month’s trading to compare with the past month," says Peter Thompson, Managing Director of the agency.

A quarter of all the homes sold in the month were for in excess of $1 million, confirms Thompson: "During the month we sold 420 homes for in excess of $1 million, 167 more than the 253 homes we sold in March last year."

The figure marks the highest number of $1 million homes sold in a month.

As a result, the average sales price also increased by 3.9 per cent month-on-month, push March's average to an all-time high of $776,729, more than $17,000 over the previous record set in December 2014.

The median price recorded last month was $711,000, 1.1 per cent up on February 2015 and 9 per cent up on March 2014. Across the first three months of 2015, the average sales price recorded by the agent jumped 6.1 per cent compared to the average for the whole of 2014 and 7 per cent compared to March 2014.

"Buyers were not put off by the record prices," adds Thompson. "For the last two weeks of the month we sold more than 400 homes each week, the highest two weeks trading in the company’s history."

"Buyers remain convinced that with a stable economy, low interest rates and restricted housing availability, that buying at current prices is manageable."

Indeed, 300 homes were sold for under $500,000, which represented 18.8 percent of sales.

Thompson concludes that high prices are also encourage owners to sell their homes: "At month’s end we had 3347 properties on our books for sale, the highest for 10 months."

This increase in supply is expected to encourage an "extremely active" level of sales for the coming months.