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Everywhere we go people talk about the property market, which makes a lot of sense as one of the Bay of Plenty's oldest and largest real estate businesses...and we don't mind one bit, we love it.
At the moment those conversations often touch on the "slowing" of the property market. This happens for a few reasons (which are valid, might we add). Nationally, we are seeing the lowest sales volumes for 6 years and the majority of the press around property is from a national perspective.
Any response to this always has to have two filters applied. First off, I focus on the Bay of Plenty, because the local market is really what people are asking for our expertise on and then we try to take a few steps back to look at the bigger picture.
Whilst it's true the Bay of Plenty has seen a slight slow-down in sales volume (7% year on year) there's two things that add perspective to this. Remember that we're comparing to 2016, which was an unprecedented real estate market and a unique set, of rare conditions for September 2017, one of the wettest winters on record and a general election that is still without a result.
People always hesitate to make decisions in election years, so we're just seeing people pause on making major changes. You could even argue that this drop in volume, was what you'd expect considering these factors. For some of that bigger picture we mentioned, when you compare this to the national sales volume average, of a 26% drop, it starts to look a lot better.
Looking at the other key measurements for our market, median house price, down 0.4% against the national average of 0.9% and days on market things, 37 compared to 39 in September 2016, even with this fairly focused perspective, things still look pretty rosey for the Bay of Plenty property market.
Things get interesting when you take a step back to get a broader perspective. When comparing 2017 to previous years, our regions property market is in a phenomenal place.
Go back as little as 3 years ago to September 2014 and the median days to sell was 14% higher, the median sale price over 34% lower all with similar stock levels. We really have seen phenomenal growth in property in our region, which continues as more people come to understand what a great place it is to live.
On top of our exciting property market, amazing beaches, beautiful forest, a growing city, an innovative business scene are all great reasons to live here. When you add improved business confidence, low unemployment and a strong and growing community we really have a lot of reasons to feel very fortunate to live where we do.
It seems like every time we step back and take a look from a wider perspective the story gets better. Not only because of the above, but also, we get to work for arguably the Bay of Plenty's best real estate business, running its oldest, locally born, real estate brand, EVES. It's a pretty good place to be, from our perspective.