Record sales last year point to a market that is “set to make a strong return in January”
Major Auckland realtor Barfoot & Thompson reported strong sales numbers last year – including its best December on record.
The firm reported sales of 12,064 properties in the 12 months to 2020 – a 21.7% year-on-year increase from 2019, which saw 9,443 properties sold. Additionally, the total value of sales in 2020 was $12,124,977,908, which is a 37.4% year-on-year increase from the $8,823,027,390 in 2019.
The last month of 2020 was particularly noteworthy as the firm’s strongest December on record. In December, the firm sold 1,479 properties – a whopping 89.9% increase from December 2019 – for a total value of $1,615,835,322.
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And the best is yet to come, with the firm saying that the New Year break would “not dampen sales momentum.”
“The market is set to make a strong return in January,” said Peter Thompson, managing director of Barfoot & Thompson. “In December we sold 1,479 properties at an average price of $1,092,518 and at the median value of $1,005,000. This is our strongest December sales ever, and the sixth straight month we have sold more than 1,000 homes in a month.”
According to Thompson, only once before has the realtor sold more than 1,000 homes in a December month – in 2014, when the market was “building towards the peak of the last price cycle.”
“For the past five years our sales numbers in December have averaged less than half this year’s December sales,” said Thompson “What these sales numbers do not show is the large number of yet to be completed and conditional sales in the pipeline, many of which will show up in January and February sales data, and this will ensure that the market makes a strong start to 2021.”
CoreLogic’s latest House Price Index (HPI) revealed that, nationwide, property prices increased by 2.6% in December 2020, taking the growth in the final quarter of the year to 6.1% – a rate not bettered since the three months ending February 2004 (6.6%).
