Bargains for the buyer and misery for the seller - mortgagee sales in the Western Bay of Plenty topped 100 last year with the same trend continuing into this year.
Latest figures released by Terralink International showed there were 104 mortgagee sales in the Western Bay last year, an increase of 15 on 2010.
Eighty of the sales took place in Tauranga, representing about 6 per cent of the total number of properties sold in the city.
Tauranga ranked fifth for mortgagee sales after Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton and the Far North District, with sales peaking in the four months from April to July, when 42 of the 80 transactions took place.
Terralink managing director Mike Donald said that nearly a quarter of last year's mortgagee sales involved individual home owners.
"More mum-and-dad property owners are losing their homes. It's hard to claim things are getting better for ordinary Kiwis while this trend continues," Mr Donald said.
This year had got off to a bad start, with preliminary figures for January and February indicating a significant increase in mortgagee sales compared with the same period last year.
Neville Falconer, a principal of LJ Hooker in Tauranga, said it was inevitably sad when a mortgagee sale involved a family.
His advice was that when homeowners saw they were heading in the wrong direction, they needed to take decisive action and get their property on the market while they still had control. Once the property was in the hands of the bank, they became a number in a process.
Mr Falconer said a mortgagee sale was not like a regular sale because all the bank was selling was the title to the property. It did not include chattels and it did not guarantee vacant possession. These risks had to be factored in by bargain hunters.
Quotable Value's Tauranga property valuer Paul Thomas said mortgagee auctions should not impact too heavily on city values.
Values may be back a little on mortgagee sales but not a great deal. A lot of the action in Tauranga's property market involved first-home buyers in the under-$300,000 bracket.
Simon Martin, managing director of Harcourts Advantage Realty, said he had noticed an increase in the number of mortgagee sales in recent years.
"We haven't noticed a huge increase. There's been a steady run of them in the last four or five years. It's well up on what it's traditionally been. When they are coming up, they're being sold," he said.
Ross Stanway, chief executive of Realty Services which operates Bayleys and Eves, said mortgagee sales made up a small percentage of Western Bay sales, but those people they did affect were often hit hard.
"I believe they have been reasonably steady in a low context. The mortgagee sales we're seeing ... have tended to come from a fairly wide range of properties," Mr Stanway said.
Some owners have had three years of pretty unrelenting economic pressure, he said. "It's certainly having an effect on some people."