Move over Auckland, Wellington looks like it's the next housing hotspot with prices increasing and inventory levels to record lows.
New statistics from Realestate.co.nz for April show the houses available for sale in Wellington is down 61 percent on the same time last year -- the lowest ever recorded.
"It means theoretically if no new listings were to come onto the market, all available property for sale in Wellington would sell out in only 5.6 weeks," chief executive Brendon Skipper says.
Mr Skipper says the imbalance between the lower stock on the market and buyers means it is a "sellers' market".
The average asking price in April in Wellington rose 2 percent from the previous month to $506,532 -- a record high for the area.
Wellington real estate agent Anji Foster says Wellington is playing catch-up, having had a flat market for around eight years.
"[A] huge amount of interest from buyers, so enormous numbers of people at open homes. It had been a year ago a big open home would be 15 to 20 groups, whereas 30 to 40 groups is the norm," she said.
At the extreme, there've been up to 180 people at an open home, she says.
She says there's "clearly an imbalance" between supply and demand.
Sellers have the upper hand in 19 other regions the website measured for April in terms of the number of listings.
Inventory listings at a national level are also at their lowest ever recorded by the website since January 2007.
In Auckland, the weeks to sell fell 2.78 percent in April 2016, compared to the same time last year.
While Auckland and Wellington had slow listing figures, sellers in Waikato, Canterbury and Otago were more active with those regions seeing double-digit percentage increases compared with the same time last year.
Newshub.
