A review of things you need to know before you go home on Monday; farms sell for higher prices, lifestyle blocks don't, migration rises, credit card use doesn't, swap rates unchanged

Here are the key things you need to know before you leave work today.

NO RATE CHANGES
There were no rate changes again today by 4pm. It's all 'wait and see' till Thursday's OCR review.

FARM SALES STRONG
There were 168 farms sold in June, the highest June level in seven years. But of that, only 15 were dairy farms. The sale price per hectare for dairy farms in the Waikato averaged $54,526, eclipsing the $53,585 in Canterbury in April. Few sales but those that did sell went for a lot. Overall, that helped push overall $/ha up 35% from June a year ago.

LIFESTYLE BLOCK SALES SOFT
There were only 442 lifestyle blocks sold nationally in June, according to today's REINZ data release. That is the lowest June level in four years. The drop-off in Canterbury was especially noticeable.

MIGRATION REVERSAL
We have gone from seeing a plane load of migrants leaving for Australia every 3 days two years ago, to barely one a month. Overall, we now attracting migrants at the rate of 100,000 a year. It's a major turnaround.

'USE YOUR CREDIT CARDS, PLEASE'
The amounts we owe on our credit cards has basically been unchanged since February, and is still below our balances in December according to the June data out today from the RBNZ. However, the banks are still pushing higher credit limits on to us. We owe $6.1 billion (not a record) and have card facilities of $20.3 billion, which is a new record. Overall, aggressive bank credit card promotions don't seem very effective.

WHOLESALE RATES
After Friday's sharp wholesale swap rates falls, today has been very quite with virtually no change. The 90 day bank bill rate was also unchanged at 3.65%.

OUR CURRENCY
The NZ dollar has moved very little today although there is a suggestion of a rising trend. It is now above 87 USc. It is at 92.7 AUc and the TWI is now just above 81.

You can now see an animation of this chart. Click on it, or click here.