Downturn over? Auckland house prices rise in March as buyers go hard for $2m-plus homes

Auckland's biggest real estate agency has reported a small uptick in house prices – and huge increase in sales numbers.

Barfoot & Thompson said the average sale price for March, in Auckland and Northland, was $1,102,933 – 0.1% up on February.

The number of sales jumped more than 86%, from 410 to 765, over the same period, while the number of new listings for the agency grew 11.5%.

Barfoot & Thompson managing director Peter Thompson said that while sales volumes were down 35% year-on-year, the March tally was the highest since May last year.

“March showed a modest but positive improvement in trading,” he said, adding that there was renewed confidence in the market.

“The pipeline of conditional sales we made in the month also increased significantly, indicating that there is likely to be a strong flow of sales going unconditional in April.

“While sales were made across all price segments, we sold 60 homes for more than $2 million. This is more than the combined number of homes we sold in this price category in the first two months of the year.”

Thompson said that the figures suggested the market had “plateaued rather than continuing to fall”.

February's sales figures for the agency were the lowest for that month for at least a quarter of a century.

The increase in house prices and sales follows separate OneRoof figures that indicate the market decline is slowing, particularly in the South Island.

Auckland's average property value is $1.317m, down 3.4% ($46,000) in the last quarter, and down 15.1% ($235,000) year-on-year, according to the latest figures from the OneRoof-Valocity House Value Index (taken at the end of March 2023).

The rate of decline in the region's average property value has eased in the last six months, from a rolling quarterly average of 5% to just over 3%, and for sellers and buyers, it's worth noting that Auckland's current average property value is still 21.49% ($233,000) above what it was five years ago.

Of the 229 Auckland suburbs with 10 or more settled sales in the last 12 months, just one, Coatesville, recorded year-on-year property value growth, according to the latest OneRoof figures.

Coatesville's average property value was up 6% to $3.812m. Property values in every other suburb were in decline.

For long-time Auckland homeowners, the suburb with the strongest five-year growth is Omaha – a beach town on the region's northern fringes favoured by wealthy Aucklanders. Its average property value has grown 56.6% ($993,000) since March 2018.