Barfoot & Thompson data: Auckland house prices, volumes up

Auckland house sale volumes by the city's largest agency bounced back last month and average prices rose $6000 during the 30 days.

Peter Thompson, managing director of Barfoot & Thompson which sells more than 40 per cent of residential properties in the city, said the data "did the opposite to economic forecasts".

During alert level 4, economists were predicting national price declines of around 7 per cent.

But Thompson said June was a remarkably solid month's trading with no signs of fragility.

The agency sold 820 properties in June "around where we would expect them to be at this time of the year and were 4.3 per cent higher than at the same time last year".

The average price was $953,417 up on May's $947,707.

The month's trading was very much business as usual, Thompson said.

"What contributed to the robustness of the market in June was solid new listings at 1582, 56.3 per cent higher than in the same month last year; an influx of first time buyers; and undoubtedly some catch up business from the slow sales in May.

"It is far too early to see this result as an indicator that the property market will ride out the Covid-19 pandemic unaffected.

"It does suggest that over a three to five-year time horizon buyers have confidence in property at today's prevailing prices and that they are not holding back in the hope of a major decline in values."

The agency sold 366 $1m-plus properties, or 44.6 per cent of all sales: "You have to go back more than two years to May 2018 to find a month when more $1m-plus sales were made," Thompson said.

Within this number 46 sales, or 5.6 per cent of all sales, were for properties that sold for $2 million or more

"At month end we had 4001 properties on our books, giving buyers their greatest choice of property for 12 months," Thompson said.

Lifestyle property sales numbers also rebounded, particularly to the south of Auckland in Pukekohe, Tuakau, Pukekawa and Te Kauwhata.