Agency hits lowest sales since lockdown
Ego pleads guilty to unsupported SPF 50+ claims Self-driving tech company floats possible sale
Auckland house sales continue to plummet, with the city’s largest real estate agency selling just 578 properties in August.
Barfoot & Thompson’s latest figures show its total number of sales was down by 43.4% compared to the 1020 sold at the same time last year, by 16.5% on the previous three months’ average of 692, and by 5.4% on 611 last month.
It was the agency’s lowest number of sales in a month since the Covid-affected sales months in mid-2020, Barfoot & Thompson managing director Peter Thompson said.
The decline in sales was where the market change was evident, because house prices plateaued in August, he said.
‘‘Previously, the average sales price had fallen four months in a row, but in August that trend was reversed with the average price over the previous month increasing by 3.1% to $1.15 million. The median price of $1.11m remained consistent with that for July.’’
Rather than signalling that prices were rising again, the reversal was likely to be an indication that prices were plateauing, he said.
The average and median prices in August were below those paid at the same time last year, down by 2% and 1.7% from $1.18m and $1.13m respectively.
‘‘But, given that there are buyers in the market, the combination of low sales numbers and stable prices indicates that vendors believe prices are bottoming out.’’
While the median price was $1.11m, 18% of the agency’s sales were for properties valued at under $750,000, he said. Only 8% of sales were for properties above $2m.
This represented a decrease in the number of $2m-plus sales from earlier in the year. In May 9.2% of sales were for properties over $2m, and in April 14% of sales were.
Last November, Thompson said the abnormally high number of homes sold in higher price categories had pushed the average and median prices up that month.
About 18.3% of those sales were for properties of over $2m.
The number of properties for sale in the region has increased significantly, and the agency ended August with 4637 properties on its books.
It was up by 78.3% on 2601 listings at the same time last year, and it was the highest number of listings at the end of August for 11 years, Thompson said.
‘‘With high new listings and a solid base of existing properties we enter the normally buoyant spring buying season with an excellent range of properties and choice for buyers.’’
An Australian skincare manufacturer has pleaded guilty to two charges under the Fair Trading Act for making unsubstantiated representations about the SPF of two of its sunscreen products. Ego Pharmaceuticals has accepted that between February 2019 and June 2020 it did not have a reasonable basis to make the SPF claims made on the sunscreen products Ego Sunsense Ultra SPF 50+ and Ego Sunsense Sensitive Invisible SPF 50+. Ego Pharmaceuticals is an Australian-owned skincare manufacturer, which supplied its products into the New Zealand market via a wholesale distributor. A new mandatory safety standard for sunscreen supplied in Aotearoa New Zealand comes into force tomorrow.
Aurora Innovation Inc.’s chief executive officer recently laid out a range of options for the selfdriving company to respond to worsening market conditions and partners pushing out timelines, including a possible sale to Apple or Microsoft, according to a document seen by Bloomberg. Chris Urmson, who co-founded Aurora after running Google’s self-driving car project, also outlined cost cuts and floated measures including taking the company private, spinning off or selling assets and pursuing a small capital raise in a memo labelled ‘‘board discussion pre-read’’ and dated August 3. A representative for Aurora said the company was considering ways to stay competitive in a challenging marketplace.