The year of rebuilding confidence
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What were the major trends in the New Zealand property market in 2025?
The raw volume of sales to first-time buyers was the highest it's been since March 2021.
Kia ora, Happy New Year and welcome to the New Zealand Property Market Podcast brought to you by Kotauri for the 12th of January 2026. I'm Head of Research Nick Goodall and today I'm joined as per usual by Chief Economist Calvin Davidson. Calvin, I hope you're well rested and enjoyed a good summer break. We'll no doubt catch up on a few highlights later on but first let's get right into closing out the 2025 for the property market. Last week, you were on hand to, of course, release the Home Value Index for December. What did it tell us about the market over that calendar year, mate? Well, gee, more of the same, really. So across the country, property values went down 0.2% in December. So it was a pretty minor fall.
But I guess just a continuation of what we've seen for most of the last year. There was a few months of increases, but mostly nothing. minor decreases and so across the calendar year down one percent now that's at the national level there's obviously regional variability but yeah just another pretty flat year really um after 2024 which was also pretty flat you know the big downturn and in 22 and 23 kind of came to an end but since then it's it's just sort of tracked sideways and so i guess yeah more of the same conflicting forces was the way we we thought 2025 might play out and it probably did in many ways with um Interest rates down, but other factors pushing the other direction, restraining house prices, things like listings, the soft labor market, sluggish economy.
So it probably just played out as we expected and largely tracking sideways. Now, there's still some regional variability in there. Auckland and Wellington, for example, were down a bit more than that in December. Christchurch and Dunedin, for example, are up. And Hamilton was another market actually that has been rising, but did see a more significant fall in December too. yeah lots of regional variability i mean provincial markets in the car or parts of canterbury west coast you know these areas uh have been going up a little bit faster so there's still that you know maybe agricultural thing underpinning some parts of the country but then auckland wellington maybe more services based confidence seems to be lacking a little bit lots of supply in auckland these things are keeping a lid on prices so yeah still regional variability but generally now you're looking at the market in 2025 and say it was it was pretty flat
and reflected those conflicting forces as we talked about probably for most of the year so um so yeah more of the same was was probably here i'd wrap it up Yeah, I think that's true. I think it surprised me a little bit to see that little mini extra decline in December. I don't know about you, but it did feel like momentum had started to shift upwards. So even if it was flat, maybe, or a tiny bit of growth is probably what I expected to happen.
How did first home buyers perform in the property market?
So it was a little bit of a surprise to me to see that decline. I think you're absolutely right in terms of, you know, it did turn out to be that year of conflicting forces. i think when we assess the the year itself i'd say we probably underestimated the impact of the headwinds of those conflicting forces we still expected some growth to occur across the year which didn't occur so i suppose that just says yeah those things that held the market back in terms of value growth anyway because we saw more transactions for sure but in terms of value growth you know those the the boost that should be provided by lower interest rates took longer and of course people are more cautious were held back by the fact that we had this faltering economy, this difficult labour market.
And I think the level of high listings was just kept quite high throughout the year. That meant that choice was there. It meant that buyers' power remained. And I think that's another thing that had a significant impact on that fact that values just never really you know, started to grow much throughout the year, even though, you know, in some months there was a little bit of growth.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What were the major trends in the New Zealand property market in 2025?
0:00–2:52
2
How did first home buyers perform in the property market?
2:52–6:20
3
What factors contributed to the decline in property values in December 2025?
6:20–11:48
4
How did regional differences impact property values across New Zealand?
11:48–28:12
5
What role did lending trends play in the property market dynamics?
28:12–32:44
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