Kiwi slowdown continues

New Zealand’s housing slowdown is now in its fourth month…

Quotable Value, a housing property value assessment agency in New Zealand, stated today on Monday that ‘the chance of growth in the housing market turning negative has increased after the latest figures’.

The agency said caution ‘is setting-in across the country’, but it appears that ‘the low end of the housing market is feeling the brunt of the problem’. National property values grew by 7.7 percent in the three months to February, down from 8.9 percent recorded across the three months to January.

The average house is sold for 393,000 NZ dollars (314,400 U.S. dollars). Almost all regions saw the pace slow, with the rate of increase dropping most heavily in Hamilton, where prices fell from 8.3 percent to 6.1 percent last month.

Growth in Auckland city slowed by 0.7 percent, by 1.4 percent in Wellington and by 0.8 percent in the South Island cities of Christchurch and Dunedin.