There’s no way around it: COVID hit the property market hard. Auctions evaporated, sales volumes dropped, and across NZ, people hit the pause button on buying or selling a home.

But now that we’re out of the lockdown and back to business, you can already see green shoots starting to appear and, despite the lockdown, prices have remained robust.

Listings returning to normal, prices steady

First, let’s take a look at the REINZ data. It paints a dour picture for April, in which there were only 1,500 or so new property listings. To put that into perspective, that’s as many in a month that the country would normally see in a week.

But then, you look ahead to May, and you can see things are starting to return to normal, with new listings steadily growing every week and unlikely to stop. Both buyers and sellers have been cooped up for so long that the underlying demand is fit to burst. You can be sure that open homes over the next little while will be booked out as a result.

At the same time, prices haven’t yet taken a knock from the lack of listings. REINZ reports a median house price of $680,000 for April, which is less than 2% down compared to the previous month – and more importantly, 8.5% up compared to 12 months ago. Listings were low, but prices stayed steady.

Despite the lockdown house prices in Christchurch have remained strong.

Easing credit restrictions

We’ve also seen some strong moves from the Reserve Bank, removing the LVR restrictions and dropping the official cash rate to make it easier for homebuyers, developers and investors to keep the property market floating with easier credit.

I won’t lie to you, lenders are going to be cautious at the moment regardless of the macroeconomics, but if you’ve got a strong financial position with good equity, I see no reason why you couldn’t keep leveraging it to expand your portfolio.

Back on the tools

And then we get to the development side. Since 2011, there’s been a steady upward trend of consents issued – usually a pretty good indicator of homes that will come onto the market – and yes, April 2020 broke that trend. But considering over that decade, residential consents literally tripled, and now everyone is back on the tools, I’m expecting that to return to normal.

The Kiwi dream of owning your own home didn’t get shoved off by COVID – and with remote working now apparently becoming even more popular, I suspect we’ll be seeing a few more requests for larger homes with offices soon.

COVID was tough and we’re still working our way through the challenges, but the property market is still strong despite the lockdown. The fact is, everyone needs a place to live, most cities in NZ have housing supply shortages and buyers are still lining up at open homes. For that reason property is still one of the safest places to put your money and will be for a long time.