Best and worst performing suburbs
Check the change in property value over the past year for the top and bottom suburbs across the country.
QV’s E-Valuer report was used to get the values per suburb. E-Valuer is an automated valuation model that is used to estimate the current market value of a house based on recent sales of nearby comparable houses. By calculating the E-Valuer estimate of market value for every house in the suburb we can track changes in the average value of each suburb over time. The annual change shown is for the period between March 2009 and March 2010 and the average values are as at March 2010.
Best performing
The six North Shore suburbs in the top 10 are all in the more affordable areas. They are reasonably centrally located and close to the motorway. Demand has been strong for houses in these areas, combined with a general shortage of properties for sale which has tended to push prices up. This comes after the very same suburbs were amongst the hardest hit when the market started to decline in 2008. So the gains of the last year have in part been a recovery of values from this decline, and now all six of these North Shore suburbs have values above the previous peak of the market.
Onemana is a small seaside village near Whangamata. Onemana is bucking the trend of many coastal communities where values have tended to remain depressed. It is a very small community, so it only takes a few unusual sales to affect the whole market. The number of sales in Onemana has been very low for the past year so this tends to make measuring changes in the market more unreliable.
Harbour View, overlooking the Hutt Valley, is also a relatively small suburb (with less than 200 houses). As a result, it too suffers from a low number of sales making it difficult to get a decent handle on the market.
Values in Kingswell, a suburb in the south of Invercargill, took a sharp dive in March and April last year. They recovered just as quickly and since then have grown only slightly. So the strong annual growth in Kingswell reflects more that there was an unusually low period this time last year than the suburb performing strongly over recent months.
Worst performing
In general, values of houses in rural centres have been flat over the last year. After the drop from the peak of the market in late 2007, values recovered in the main urban areas, but in the rural areas stayed more or less at that lower level. The same applies to many holiday home and coastal communities where people have been trying to reduce debt. As a result the demand for properties in these areas has been very weak, so prices have been depressed.
Traditional investor areas have also been hard hit. The general lack of capital gains, difficulty in securing funding, and the uncertainty around tax changes has meant the investor market has cooled off. Otahuhu is one such area.
You can check out the current estimate of your property’s value with E-Valuer. Simply search for your property and select E-Valuer from the list of reports.