This Week's Lifestyle Properties and Open Homes

It’s an interesting time in the market at the moment. The media messaging is still driving people to believe that the market is dead, but the activity across the team each week seems to remain consistently busy.  Open homes last week were mostly all attended apart from a few, making the ones without any attendee’s the exception which was not the case that long ago.  There are genuine buyers making genuine offers and from a real estate point of view, activity vs. non-activity is gold because it gives us good information from the market. In terms of values, I found the following from Tony Alexander interesting as it supports the activity we are seeing but also connects back to value. This is based on the comparison of todays market activity to 2021 activity:  In the March quarter of 2021, it took an average of 31 days to sell a house. The average now is 50 days. The only thing the same now as back then is prices. As measured by the REINZ’s nationwide House Price Index, prices over the March quarter of 2026 were the same as in the March quarter of 2021. But back then, prices were up by 22% on the year before and up by 8.5% on the previous quarter. Now, prices have dropped by 0.1% on the year before and just 0.2% ahead of the December 2025 quarter.  Key takeaway here is, activity has been increasing, but it’s important that offers are genuine and not ‘low-balling’ as we find that the markets value isn’t always the vendors and being able to show genuine intention is important in a market where the perception is values are dropping.  It never sits well with a vendor so having something real and within reason goes a long way towards bringing things together.

Properties sold this week
81 Kaiwaka Road, Tangoio
28 Pitt Street, Clive