Barfoot & Thompson signal strong Auckland sales in August

Barfoot & Thompson reported their August sales results showing a strong performance with sales of 830 sales and an average sale price of $532,023. Barfoot & Thompson are the largest real estate group to operate in the Auckland market and provide an early indicator to the likely performance for the country at large.

The sales as shown in the chart below have risen from the trough which perpetuated for much of the 12 months to February of this year when average monthly sales hovered around 550. Whilst this does represent a 50% year on year increase at 830 sales – the figure for August 2006 (936) and August 2007 (765) does provide some perspective.

In terms of average selling price the tracking of price in the region over the past 3 years shows the significant rise through the final year of inflationary pricing in late 2006 / early 2007 followed by the plateauing through the remainder of 2007 before prices began to fall from the peak of December 2007 when the average price reached $559,804.

The current price level of $532,023 represents a 5% fall from peak, somewhat of a recovery from the low point of March of this year when the fall from peak totaled 12%.