News & Research

It’s obviously been an unprecedented year for the economy and property market so far in 2020, but it’s at least been reassuring that the number of appraisals generated by real estate agents, for-sale and for-rent listings, valuations ordered by banks, mortgage lending flows, and agreed sales activity have all...

On our quarterly index, which is based on agreed sales each quarter, national average house values recorded a fall in the COVID-affected Q2 period as a whole. Of course, price falls shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise, given the recession and rising unemployment.

The latest research from Christchurch Cityscope shows that commercial property sales’ value in Christchurch’s CBD has decreased in the past three months.

This Pulse takes a break from COVID-related analysis and looks at the CoreLogic Buyer Classification data relating to property type.

According to the June 2020 QV House Price Index (HPI) results out today, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic shutdown on the property market is starting to show.

We’ve recently run a survey of users of our Property Guru platform and the results are a reality check on some of the strong positive sentiment that’s emerged lately about the housing market’s prospects.

After the enforced break for most mortgage lending activity in April, a rebound was always going to be seen in May – and activity did indeed recover last month, but perhaps not as strongly as might have been expected.

Well, here we are in level one! Almost as fast as we went into lock-down it feels like we’ve jumped back to normal life. And it looks like market activity is heading back to some sort of normality too.

Since COVID-19 has set in, many commentators have argued that net migration is set for a long collapse and that this will remove a key leg from the property market.

It goes without saying that recent months have been a hugely distorted period for the property market. But deals have still been done, and CoreLogic’s Buyer Classification figures show that investors have remained key players in terms of market share (albeit a lower number of deals).

The difference in values between three bedroom and four bedroom properties hasn’t really changed in the past year, and is at least $125,000 in each of the main centres (and more than $350,000 in central Auckland). So it’s still not going to be easy for people who want more space (e.g. to work from home) to...

Four months ago, I wrote a piece focusing on the possible impacts of COVID-19, noting the 85,000 cases and 2,500 deaths that had occurred at the time. Those numbers sounded bad but pale compared to today's statistics. What isn’t reported so widely is that globally, the insurance industry will take an...

In the coming months, there are likely to be some ‘bargains’ on offer for property investors, although a slowdown in value growth may well mean more emphasis on a property’s rental yield.