There was plenty of action in the auction rooms last year with interest.co.nz monitoring the auctions of 12,401 residential properties around the country in 2023.
Of course those numbers were not evenly spread throughout the year.
They started off reasonably strongly at between 200 and 300 a week in the first three months of the year, then dropped back to around 200 or less between April and August, before increasing strongly again from September to November and then tailing off in December.
There was nothing unusual in those numbers because regardless of whether the housing market is in boom or bust mode, it will generally still follow the usual seasonal trends, with activity falling away over winter, rising again in spring before taking a rest over the Christmas break and and then coming back strongly in February/March.
So 2023 was no different in that regard.
A more interesting picture of what was happening in the market last year comes from looking at the trend for the number of properties that sold under the hammer.
The first graph below shows the number of properties offered at auction each week compared to the number that sold under the hammer in the same week.
The second graph shows the number that sold under the hammer as a percentage of total properties auctioned.
These graphs show that the number of properties being auctioned last year starting increasing strongly mid-August, almost reaching 600 a week in late November before starting to drop away again in December.
The number selling under the hammer also increased over the same period, but at a much slower rate and as the first graph shows, the gap between the number of properties being auctioned and the number selling at auction steadily widened in the second half of the year.
As the second graph shows, the under-the-hammer sales rate peaked at over 50% in August/September but had dropped back to around a third by the end of the year.
That suggests the market was probably a bit tougher at the end of last year than the number of properties being brought to market would suggest.
It will be interesting to see the trends that emerge over the next few weeks.
There have already been a handful of auctions this year and interest.co.nz monitored 13 over the last week.
Of those 13, just three produced a sale under the hammer, giving a sales rate of 23%.
But it is still too soon and those numbers are too small to draw any conclusions from them about the state of the market.
But by February a clearer picture should emerge of where things are likely headed in 2024.
So not long to wait.
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