The real estate agency saw 474 sales in February, as compared to 665 in February last year and 653 in January.
That’s a year-on-year drop of 28.7% and a month-on-month drop of 27.4%.
Barfoot & Thompson managing director Peter Thompson says February’s sales numbers were the lowest in a month since December 2008, which was at the high point of the global financial crisis.
“In the first two months of the year, sales numbers at 1,127 are down 10.4% on what they were for the first two months of last year.
“The market has failed to gain any momentum since the holiday break and has made its slowest start to a year in more than a decade.”
But in the last two weeks of February we sold more than 250 properties each week on a signed off basis (unconditional and conditional) which was 47.3% higher than in the first two weeks, he says.
“It underlines that the pipeline of potential sales is beginning to build.
“The market is progressively hardening into a buyers’ market with a number of vendors preferring to take their property off the market when they cannot achieve their asking price.
“This trend can be seen in February’s data, during which we listed an additional 1,563 properties yet at month end we had 4,660 listings on our books, only a 7.5% increase on those for January.”
It wasn’t only sales volumes that were down in February, Barfoot & Thompson’s data shows that both the median sales price and the average sales price declined again.
Auckland’s median price in February was $801,000, which was down by 2.3% on February 2018’s median price of $820,000 and by 3.2% on January’s median price of $827,500.
The region’s average sales price was also down, although not as much. It was $918,496 in February, which was a 0.1% dip on $919,454 in February 2018 and a 0.9% decrease on $927,181 in January.
Thompson says that sales of property in the $1 million to $2 million price category represented 27.8% of total sales while sales in the under $500,000 price category represented 12.7% of sales.
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