Summer holiday spot fetching top prices
Sweet home Coromandel, where the prices are so high.
Yes, that’s right, the asking price for houses at the summer holiday hot spot of Coromandel hit an all-time high in August, according to website realestate.co.nz. And so did Waikato’s. The high prices were driven by an extremely small number of houses listed for sale, says the website chief executive Brendon Skipper.
Coromandel was particularly notable with its 141 new listings, down 12.4 per cent from the same month in 2015.
Lack of supply in that region saw August listings reach an all time high average asking price of $636,297, up 7.2 per cent from the month before.
Waikato had 894 listings, which was down by 4.8 per cent, and an average asking price of $482,623.
The price was a slight nudge up at 1.3 per cent from July’s average.
The website generates the most residential properties for sale in New Zealand.
If no more houses came on the market, it would take 14 weeks for the houses for sale in New Zealand to dry up.
The number of houses for sale in Auckland was up by 4 per cent compared to the same time last year, while the rest of the country was down compared the same time last year.
The number of listings had dropped by 12.4 per cent, which implies houses are taking longer to sell, Skipper said.
‘‘Which could be a result of the loan to value restrictions,’’ he said.
In July, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand ruled banks could only lend to residential property investors if they had a 40 per cent deposit.
However, those restrictions were put in place in Auckland in 2015, which Skipper believed was adding to the slowing of sales in the region.
On top of these figures, the International Monetary Fund released a quarterly global housing report showing New Zealand outpaced 30 other of the world’s richest countries when house prices were compared with income during the first quarter of this year.