House prices still on the up

The definition of a million-dollar house is changing in Marlborough, where the average house price just keeps rising.

The region’s median house price during March was a record $664,000, up 27.7 per cent on March 2020 when it was $520,000, the latest figures from Real Estate Institute of New Zealand showed.

The top three residential sales in Marlborough were

$1.8 million, $1.28m and $1.125m.

Summit Marlborough sales manager Nadine Thomas said she was stunned each time she heard what sort of houses had sold for more than $1m.

‘‘When I get the monthly sales figures I fall off my chair about 10 times over,’’ Thomas said.

She pointed to two recent sales in Omaka Landing which were standard-sized new builds, ‘‘no architectural elements or anything exceptional’’, that both went for more than $1m.

‘‘It’s supply and demand, that’s it,’’ she said.

Thomas knew of a couple who bought a house in Marlborough for just under a million in

January or February last year, which sold a year later for $1.4m.

She also knew people planning to sell their Marlborough homes and move to a more affordable property further south, to ‘‘cash in’’ on the huge jump in property prices here.

‘‘This is all thanks to previous governments creating the housing shortages over the last 30-odd years, by depleting government housing here and expecting mum and dad investors to make up for it, and now crucifying them with these new policies – the extended bright-line test and new interest policies,’’ Thomas said.

‘‘The idea there is to curtail the number of investors in the market, but first-home buyers can’t afford these house prices anyway, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.’’

REINZ acting chief executive Wendy Alexander said the national median house price jumped by 24.3 per cent, from $665,000 in March last year to a record $826,300 last month, with 12 out of 16 regions reaching record highs.

Marlborough also had its lowest number of homes sold for the month of March in a decade. There were 73 houses sold last month, down 24.5 per cent from 97 house sales in March 2020.

The region also had the lowest number of days to sell houses for the month of March since 2003.

First National Marlborough branch manager Angela Bowers said she believed buyer interest had cooled very slightly in the past few weeks. ‘‘It’s not that people are losing interest, it’s just that it had been at such a frenzy

. . . We may see the average number of days to sell go up a little – instead of one week on the market, it may go up to two.’’

Bowers said she was concerned the policy changes intended to reduce investor activity could actually hinder first-home buyers in the long term, as landlords passing costs on to renters would most likely reduce the rate they could save for first-home deposits.

‘‘I haven’t seen much of an impact from the new policy announcements, of landlords selling up, at this stage, but that’s probably because they’re being phased in over four years.’’

May would be a better month to get a gauge on demand and supply, as Marlborough’s market tended to be affected by the grape harvest and a few long weekends in March and April, Bowers said.