Auckland house sales soared 65pc in March, firm reports

Barfoot & Thompson's house sales were up 65pc in March. Photo / Herald on Sunday

An Auckland real estate firm is reporting a 65 per cent surge in house sales during March, saying the market has "come out of hibernation".

Barfoot & Thompson, which releases monthly sales stats for Auckland, says home buyers have "returned to the Auckland market with a vengeance", - with March sales reaching a 20 month high.

Its agents sold 924 homes, up 65.3 per cent on February and 46.2 per cent on March 2008.

Prices were down though - the average of $491,780 was a 4.1 per cent fall on February's prices and 5.8 per cent on the average for March last year.

"We sold close to 300 homes more in March than in any month in the whole of 2008, said company managing director Peter Thompson.

"A recovery of this order is greater than any expectation, and it may well contain an element of released intention," he said. "Buyers may be sensing that market prices are close to the bottom of the cycle and have made the decision to act.

The numbers meant the housing market was active and "edging further back to normality."

Shamubeel Eaqub, director of Australia and New Zealand investment research for Goldman Sachs JBWere, said the "surprise and huge bounce in sales is consistent with mortgage approvals, but there are uncertainties around the durability of this surge, with job losses yet to fully flow through the economy."

The level of sales, while still historically low, showed "the first encouraging signs of traction from lower interest rates".

Peter Thompson said factors affecting March's sales activity were a "traditional March spike", further falls in the Reserve Bank OCR, bank mortgage rates reaching new lows and knowledge that tax cuts were about to kick in.

- HERALD ONLINE