Nick Goodall

Welcome to New Zealand Property Market Podcast brought to you by Cotaldi for the 23rd of March, 2026.

I'm Head of Research, Nick Goodall, and today I'm joined as per usual with our Chief Economist, Calvin Davidson.

Calvin, I think we've got plenty of economic data to digest later, in particular, of course, the GDP result for Q4, which was out last week.

But first, let's take us through the release of our chart pack last week.

I think there are a couple of things we often focus on here, our buyer classification series, first-time buyers, what they're up to, as well as those sales volumes, which we put the chart in for that one too.

So, yeah, take it away, mate.

What were those key outtakes and how did the media release go?

Yeah, definitely.

And I think I'm sort of leaning the same as you in terms of how much can you attribute February's weaker sales to December's strength.

But I think there's probably something in it.

The only thing that's sort of making me probably take pause a bit more with that was I saw your chart that you put together for your internal sort of weekly update to Cotality staff.

and that chart of like annual change of sales volumes and you can just see it trending downwards so yes it's still positive most months I know the last couple weren't but you can just see it slowing down so it does look like it's kind of you know maybe we do can actually call this a bit of fatigue like we've seen increasing sales volumes they're still going up generally especially on an annual basis but maybe is going to sort of reach a bit of a crescendo at some stage soon I also wonder you

You know that our forecast for sales volumes, we sort of had volumes going from 91,000 last year to around about 100,000 this year.

But that forecast is obviously based on forecasts from the Reserve Bank around GDP and migration and interest rates and inflation and stuff like that.

all of which are now a little bit old too.

So I suspect once we get updated versions of those, it's going to dial back those sales volume forecasts.

So I do wonder if, you know, seeing sales volumes at 100k might be a little bit optimistic at this stage, and it will come dialed back a bit if we don't see that economic growth this year that we expected.

So yeah, I'm starting to lean more towards saying actually, this slowdown is a bit more real.

We've seen it sort of take hold in Tauranga first.

Now there's signs of Wellington