Drop in Barfoot & Thompson's auction numbers suggests we may be past the summer peak

Starting to get chilly! (And the weather too)

Australia. House prices rose 23.7% for the year to Dec 2021.

Can't hop across the ditch.

Saw an interesting statistic yesterday.

Between 13 Feb and 19 March 2021, Barfoot had a sales rate of 69.6%.

Between 14 Feb and 20 March this year, 28.6%.

Ray white sold about 100 I think I counted with a clearance rate of 44% (I'm not connected to any realestate company), lots of smoke and mirrors when looking in isolation, 

It's lower than this number because this doesn't consider the actions we pull before the auction day (when we have properties with no bidders registered). 

Miserable.

This looks like a bit of a bargain. The owner of the other duplex should have bought it. Auctioned on Wednesday and got 740k:

125 Titirangi Road

Let’s see what happens as rates continue to raise up from emergency levels. These houses on auction are the ones with best chance of selling, prices will need to come down before people invest in this over valued market.

Ohno. Its now regular news in the main press. Who knew people could read....including FHB'ers.

That Manukau result is a real shocker.

It is pretty hard to double interest rates and not collapse a market.  The response to the Covid cold was was to lock the world up causing massive disruption.  The answer is to unlock the world and supply it with capital so  things in short supply can become more abundant.  It is getting hard not to think that the people driving this are either stupid or they are engineering a collapse.

Auckland has got way overinflated in the last two years when you look at the dollar increases (as opposed to percentage increases)

Winter is coming...

A report from the streets:

I watched Wednesday's Barfoot's 10am auction session (Shortland street venue) streamed on-line.  I was interested to see what was selling and what was not selling.  Well, in my experience, they always put the most likely property to sell and attract the most bids, first. That creates a more positive atmosphere for the rest of the auction.  So, they auctioned first a standard 2 bedroom brick and tile home unit (near my sisters unit) that was in an above average location. It did create multiple bids and sold for $1,200,000 to a Sydney phone bidder. The new rateable (capital) valuation of $1,100,000 had just come out a week or so before. Apart form the sale of a couple of top-of-the-range super-mansions and dungas around the $1,000,000 mark everything else was 'passed in'.  It seems to seems to me that those vendors expecting between say  $1,500,000 if not pristine, and say $3,000,000, is over-priced for the market...what did strike me was the number of architecturally-designed multi-storey town-houses squeezed into small infill sites, even if in the grammar zone, with no bidders; often the design of these town-houses consisted of a number of cubic shapes jutting out in all directions with no overall coherence and at least 3 or 4 stories high;  also run-of-the-mill properties in pedestrian peripheral locations wanting the same price as the same house would get in a better location.

Most of the few that did sell on that session required the auctioneer to interrupt the bidding, if it had not reached the reserve, and take both vendor and the top bidder into a private room to negotiate the sale price.

I would conclude that only home units particularly in above-average locations and the mansions that only the truly wealthy can afford, will not decrease markedly in price.

Great, keep the supply off the market and then it's a waiting game of who blinks first.  People will always need a place to stay and never want to rent for life.

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