KEY POINTS:
If you've owned a house in Wanganui for four or five years, there's good news and bad news in the latest real estate sales data dump.
First, the bad news: median prices in your city dropped 5 per cent in the first nine months of this year - the biggest drop of all the North Island cities analysed by the Herald on Sunday in its latest quarterly review.
If you had to sell last month you would have received on average $9000 less than your house was worth at the beginning of the year.
But if you bought around 2003, you could be forgiven for crowing over your great vision. Wanganui is head of the pack - an amazing 136 per cent lift in median price in the four years to September 30, 2007. Gisborne (123 per cent) and New Plymouth (121 per cent) weren't too far away.
Up in Auckland, no area came within a country mile of such price growth. The best performance since 2003 was Franklin county (81 per cent), followed by Manurewa (76 per cent) and Ellerslie-Panmure (67 per cent). The wider Auckland median rose 44 per cent in that time.
Auckland has the highest city median price in the country ($445,000 compared with Wanganui's $170,000, Whangarei's $310,000 and Tauranga's $369,500), but why are its provincial cousins a leap ahead in growth terms?
The simple answer: it hasn't always been that way. As Auckland's growth has slowed, the regions have had their spurts. Wanganui, for example, looked a cot case right up to 2004. In January, 1992, the median sale price in the city was $80,000. Nine years later, at the start of the latest residential property boom, it had dropped to $78,675.
Even at the beginning of 2004 it seemed as if property inflation was an economic reality everywhere in New Zealand except for Wanganui. In January that year, the city recorded a median sale price of $80,000 - the same as 12 years earlier.
Householders and investors who gave up on Wanganui in 2004 would now be regretting their decision. While property owners in most parts of the country did pretty well in the three years to January 2007, none did better than Wanganui where the median value jumped 115 per cent to $172,000 (as against Auckland's rise of less than 40 per cent to $420,000).
So no one today will be too upset at the river city's 5 per cent slip so far this year.
On the other coast, Gisborne has continued its gangbuster run this year, leaving Napier and Hastings in its smoke. Gisborne's median price was up 16 per cent in the first nine months of the year, and an impressive 23 per cent over the last year. Napier, meanwhile, has been flat this year and Hastings is up just 4 per cent since September 2006.
But, as in Wanganui and Rotorua, Gisborne's prices had fallen behind and it's been catch-up time.
The other standout performer for the first nine months of this year has been Hamilton, up 14 per cent.
On the other hand, Mt Maunganui-Papamoa is just keeping up with inflation, with 2 per cent growth so far this year. Over four years, the area is the worst-performing of the main North Island centres.
But homeowners who have been around for a while know that's nothing to fret about. Since 1992, the median house price in the Tauranga seaside suburbs has increased four-fold - and only Waiheke Island among the North Island centres can match that.
Looking for the next hot spot
Predicting the next boom towns is never an exact science but those in touch with the market say to look for where the money is and find a town nearby with relatively low-cost housing.
South Waikato towns such as Tokoroa and Mangakino are worth a look, says a spokesman for Quotable Value. The average sale price is still low - $146,000 - but South Waikato should start to benefit from the dairy boom.
Similarly Taranaki, prospering on the back of the dairy industry and the oil/gas boom, is another area to watch. While the average house sale price in New Plymouth is $335,000 towns such as Rangitaiki have average house prices around $170,000.
In the South Island punters predict Invercargill, with its average house price of $186,000, will also prosper from dairy and the industry around prospecting oil licences.
