Mortgagee sales fell in March, says real estate website

Mortgagee sale numbers are falling, according to property website realestate.co.nz.

Chief executive Alistair Helm said 412 houses were being sold under mortgagee terms in February.

But this dropped to 335 properties last month.

Helm said the word 'mortgagee' was still the #1 search phrase on the site with over 1,000 searches in the past week, however this was dwarfed by levels of 3,500 per week in mid February.

In addition to a cooling of searching interest the number of mortgagee property listings on the website has been falling steadily.

From a peak of 412 listings in the second week of February the number has declined to the latest level of just 335. This total is an audited number, said Helm, that excluded the 18 listings which sought to "leverage the keyword of mortgagee" to attract viewer attention.

The majority of mortgagee properties lies within the main metropolitan centres, said Helm, with Auckland accounting for 45 per cent of all the listings closely followed by 17 per cent in Canterbury, then the Bay of Plenty and the Waikato with 7 per cent each.

Wellington is distant last with just 3 per cent of all mortgagee listings.

The trend of mortgagee listings had shown a steady rise through all of 2008 to reach a peak of 423 in the middle of November. Numbers then fell at Christmas before rising again in January.

"The one irrefutable fact of mortgagee properties is that they cannot sit on the market for an indefinite period like normal property listings - there is urgency on the part of the lender to liquidate to clear the outstanding debt," said Helm.