East Asian interest in Auckland property accounts for 5% online listing views

Many East Asian buyers are likely to be immigrants already living in New Zealand

A viewership analysis by realestate.co.nz, New Zealand’s largest property listing website, indicates that visitors to the portal who are primary speakers of an East Asian language comprise around 5% of all online traffic viewing Auckland property, up from 4% the same time last year.

Moreover, geo-location analysis shows that almost half the East Asian online traffic is likely to originate in New Zealand from immigrants already living here. The analysis of realestate.co.nz online traffic data was for the period of January to April 2015.

Total traffic from the ten largest East Asian countries and territories, measured as a percentage of unique sessions, accounted for 2.8% of total traffic for Auckland properties on realestate.co.nz in January to April 2015, compared to 2.98 % for the same period last year.

 

 

These nations and territories include China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

“This data indicates that interest in New Zealand property originating from these ten countries in East Asia has remained at a consistent and relatively small proportion of total traffic to our website, comprising slightly less than 3% in both periods measured in 2014 and 2015,” says Brendon Skipper, CEO of realestate.co.nz.

“However, with around 5% of our visitors indicating fluency in an East Asian language, while only 2.8% of offshore traffic originate from East Asian countries, it is clear that a large number of these Asian language speakers are actually located in New Zealand.”

The default language setting in the device of each visitor to realestate.co.nz is automatically detected, which allows the property portal to create a linguistic map of total traffic.

The company is able to quantify traffic numbers for each language setting, regardless of location, including speakers of Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other East Asian languages who are residing in New Zealand.

 

 

Property prices stabilise nationally

Property asking prices nationwide have stabilised in July, with an increase of only 0.1% recorded. Asking prices in Auckland, Canterbury, Wellington and Hawke’s Bay have all fallen marginally, with Waikato the only major population centre to show an increase. The average asking price in Auckland decreased by 1.4% – the most significant decrease since October 2014.

“We have seen occasional minor decreases in Auckland property prices over the last few years, so we must assume this is a temporary blip,” says Skipper. “The overall price graph in Auckland is still trending strongly upwards.”

Nationally, the market is tight, with inventory at its lowest level since realestate.co.nz started recording this metric in January 2007. Inventory is a measure of supply and demand that indicates how long it would take, in theory, for all the current properties on the market to be sold at the current average rate of sales. The inventory for July 2015 is 18 weeks, almost half the long-term average of 35 weeks. The West Coast and Taranaki are the only regions in the country where the current supply exceeds the local long-term average.

Following the usual seasonal pattern, new property listings in July 2015 increased from the previous month. Listings are also up compared to July 2014, with 5.6% more properties coming onto the market this July than in the same month last year.

Seven of the 19 New Zealand regions had more properties coming on sale in July 2015 than in July 2014, including the Auckland market, which has a large influence on national figures. Waikato had the largest listing increase of 21.8%, followed by Auckland (+20.2%), Marlborough (+14.3%), Hawke’s Bay (+13.6%), Gisborne (+6.55), Northland (+4.9%) and Canterbury (+3.6%).