Mason Parker Mortgagee Marketing Specialist

With Alistair’s access to brilliant real estate data from the Real Estate web portal www.realestate.co.nz he has recently added a good blog comment on where he sees the mortgagee trends

Well worth a read – http://www.realestate.co.nz/blog/latest-mortgagee-sales-data-shows-only-half-the-story.html 

Fundamentally Alistair’s view of the data is that national mortgagee sales are looking like plateauing – he does this by noting the trend that most mortgagee listings generally sell within a short timeframe after listing – and that he has noticed a plateauing of mortgagee listings on www.realestate.co.nz and funnily enough a reduction in the number of people searching for mortgagee sales on www.realestate.co.nz

Perhaps this means that the low levels of mortgage rates – particularly for those current borrowers on floating mortgages – are helping distressed homeowners hold onto their properties.

It seems to be showing a strong increase in mortgagee sales – no secrets there- but the regional differences are interesting.

Auckland appears to have maintained a high level of Mortgagee Sales — this would match the decrease in housing affordability in our largest city. And Wellington had the dubious honour of having the largest growth March 2008 to March 2009.

There seems to be a strong correlation that the further North you go the higher the chance of seeing mortgagee sales – not sure if this is a population based trend but I striongly suspect its a housing affordability trend as incomes nationally ae not too disimilar whereas housing prices are!

Interestingly Levin now has 6 Mortgagee Listings today on www.realestate.co.nz – see them here This is a rise – a month ago there were only four mortgagee listings.
I also ran a quick search on www.realestate.co.nz and found 344 mortgagee sales (by searching using the keyword “mortgagee” …this may include listings with mortgagee as keyword but is all I can  do)

Download the report here