Chinese buyers not big part of market: Data

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New data from realestate.co.nz shows that property prices are stabilising nationwide - and East Asian buyers, including Chinese, are far less active than some reports have indicated.

Monday, August 3rd 2015, 10:07AM 1 Comment

by Miriam Bell

Less than 3% of realestate.co.nz’s online traffic comes from East Asia*, according to an analysis of the website’s viewers.

The analysis revealed about 5% of all those looking at Auckland property have an East Asian language as their first language.

This is a slight increase from 4% over the same time period last year.

However, geo-location analysis showed that about half of that traffic came from people already living in New Zealand.

Further, Auckland property traffic from the 10 largest East Asian countries amounted to just 2.8% of the total in the period January to April 2015.

This compares to the 2.98% recorded over the same period last year.

Realestate.co.nz CEO Brendon Skipper said the data indicated that East Asian interest in New Zealand property was a consistent, but relatively small, proportion of the website’s total traffic.

“It is clear that a large number of these Asian language speakers are actually located in New Zealand.”

The website creates a linguistic map of traffic using the default language setting in the device of each of its visitor, he explained.

This enables realestate.co.nz to quantify traffic numbers for each language setting, regardless of location, including those who are residing in New Zealand.

Meanwhile, the website’s monthly data showed that property asking prices nationwide have stabilised in July, with an increase of only 0.1%.

Asking prices in Auckland, Canterbury, Wellington and Hawke’s Bay all fell marginally, with Waikato the only major population centre to show an increase.

Auckland’s average asking price fell by 1.4% – which was the biggest drop since October 2014.

However, Skipper said the overall price graph in Auckland was still trending strongly upwards.

“We have seen occasional minor decreases in Auckland property prices over the last few years, so we must assume this is a temporary blip.”

The data also showed that housing market inventory was tight nationally, which means that supply in most centres round the country is low.

Only in the West Coast and Taranaki does current supply exceed the local long-term average.

None the less, listings were up nationally.

Seven of the 19 New Zealand regions had more properties come to the market in July 2015 than in July 2014.

This included the Auckland market, which has a large influence on national figures.

*Realestate.co.nz's East Asia country grouping was China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

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