November 2024 Market Update

The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) has released the November 2024 figures. To better understand the state of the market and where it might be heading, I created some simple graphs. Personally, I find it much easier to scan a graph to see not just how the numbers have changed since last month but also to identify any longer-term trends. It’s far more helpful for me than trying to make sense of numbers scribbled on a piece of paper. Hopefully, these visuals will be useful to you too.

Below we see the number of monthly sales for each month over the last 2 years which is making many Real Estate agents feel a little giddy :) it has been a long time since we have seen a number as good as November's 96 sales.

The OCR (official cash rate) is moving downwards and that is exactly what is expected for interest rates which will be giving buyers confidence as it does appear the downward trend will continue if perhaps slowly for some time.

The graph below shows which price ranges the above November 24 sales came from, the obvious standout must be the 20 Sales over 1 million.

There is a discrepancy for the month of November, REINZ states 96 sales but when we count the individual sold properties there is actually 101 sales, I have checked both set of numbers a few times with the same results so am unsure where the discrepancy comes from, but the 96 sales above is awesome, and even better if the true number as I suspect is 101 as shown below with the aid of a calculator.

The median sale price offers valuable insights but can be a little misleading. While it serves as a useful indicator of housing price trends, it is most effective when analyzed over a longer period such as the two-year span shown in the graph below. Simply comparing it to the previous month's data doesn’t provide a reliable measure of whether sale prices are truly rising or falling, it may simply indicate a larger number of either lower or higher cost homes sold that month.

A question we are often asked, how long is it taking to sell in Rotorua?, well the median time to sell in Nov 24, in Rotorua was 47 days which does like there is something of a downward trend emerging, but as you can see that number does fluctuate a lot, even monthly.