Posts Tagged ‘inventory’

There is a lot of property on the market – over the past 2 years as the market has progressively cooled the number of properties on the market as featured for sale on realestate.co.nz has grown steadily from around 48,000 to over 68,000. This means that based on the rate of property sales that the number of “months worth of stock” on the market has grown from around 5 months to well over 12 months.

The graph below shows this very clearly with the area in green representing the number of residential properties on the market over the past 2 years, whilst the red bars represent the number of sales per month falling from highs of over 10,000 to the current flat level of around 4,000 per month.

The website of realestate.co.nz represents the listings of over 95% of the listings of licensed real estate agents and is therefore an accurate bell-weather of the market. More properties being searched by fewer buyers means that you can and should shop around. It is important to clarify that the figures quoted here are an estimate of the number of properties on the market. As properties are often marketed by more than one agent the number of listings shown on the website will often be more due to this “multiple listings” which appear as duplicates of the same property.

In terms of advice – firstly don’t just look at new listings, have a look a little further down the page of listings on the search results – maybe for ones that have been on the market for a few months, there may be some hidden opportunities to approach the agent to discuss a property that has not been actively viewed in recent weeks. Remember that every property on the website is currently being managed by a licensed real estate agent and is therefore genuinely “on the market” to be sold. Agents earn commission when a property is sold and therefore properties are not added on a whim – that agent is only going to earn any income when the property sells.

Think about opening up your geographical range so you can find a range of optional properties that match your criteria – don’t forget that for any property on the market, Zoodle can tell you the in-zone schools which is so important.