The housing market is not its usual self at the moment and several indicators suggest it is a bit under the weather as it comes down from its summer highs.
The first area of concern is prices.
Take a look at the graph below which tracks the REINZ's median selling price from month to month.
It shows that after the precipitous increase in prices that occurred between May 2020 and November 2021, and the sharp correction which followed until August 2022, prices have gone, well, more or less nowhere.
Sure there's been monthly movements up and down, but the overall direction has been flat.
Prices have gone nowhere for the last two and half years.
Normally, stable property prices might be regarded as a good thing, but what makes the latest trend unusual is that prices have remained flat while mortgage interest rates have been falling.
Between November 2023 and March 2025, the average of the two year fixed rates charged by the main banks declined from 7.04% to 5.08%.
Normally that would result in an enthusiastic increase in prices, but over the same period the REINZ's median selling price declined slightly from $795,000 to $790,000.
Prices have remained as flat as a pancake, even as the cost of servicing a mortgage has declined.
That is a fundamental change to the usual patterns we would expect to see in the property market.
Another sign that things are not quite right is the build up of stock that's occurring.
The second graph below shows the total number of residential properties for sale on Realestate.co.nz at the end of each month from March 2021 to March 2025.
Over that period it has increased from 19,437 to 36,870, a 90% increase.
That would be okay if sales had kept pace, but they haven't.
In fact sales declined over that period, from 10,151 in March 2021 to 7640 in March 2025, a drop of 25%.
That in turn has led to a huge increase in the overhang of unsold properties still on the market at the end of each month, which has ballooned from 5678 in March 2021 to 28,072 in March 2025, an almost 500% increase - see the third graph below for the monthly trends.
And that has been occurring even though there has been a sharp jump in the number of unsold properties being withdrawn form the market each month.
Interest.co.nz estimates that 3231 residential properties were withdrawn from the market in March this year and that over the 12 months to March 36,106 properties were withdrawn, up 31.5% compared to the previous 12 months.
That's a lot of dissatisfied vendors out there, and their reasons for selling probably haven't changed much and may have become more urgent.
That represents a latent supply of additional stock waiting in the wings to come back onto the market.
All of this is occurring as the market bids farewell to the buoyant days of summer and needs to be at its most resilient to weather the coming winter gloom.
Add to that the general economic uncertainties which seem to multiply by the day, and the best that could be said for the housing market over the next few months is that it's heading into uncharted waters.
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Median price - REINZ
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