\u201cWe\u2019ve now had three subdued months in a row, which indicates a weaker first quarter than expected. It\u2019s not a sharp downturn, but it does show that confidence is still muted and buyers are taking their time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, property values held relatively steady through the softer sales environment, with the national median rising 0.2% in March and 0.3% across the first quarter. <\/p>\n
In Auckland, property values were down 0.2% over the first quarter of the year and down 3.4% over the past 12 months.<\/p>\n
\u201cAuckland still looks expensive in dollar terms, but when you look at it against local incomes it\u2019s more affordable than it has been for quite some time,\u201d Davidson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s helping support demand in that market, even if price growth remains fairly contained overall.\u201d<\/p>\n
First-home buyers remained steady in March, accounting for more than 27% of purchases nationally across the first quarter, above their long-term average of about 22%.<\/p>\n
Davidson said the consistency of first-home buyer activity was fairly evenly spread across the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cLower house prices compared to a few years ago, reduced mortgage rates and KiwiSaver withdrawals are all helping,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut just as important is that many buyers don\u2019t need a full 20% deposit. More than half of first-home buyer lending is still being done below that threshold, which makes a real difference to access.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe\u2019ve now had three subdued months in a row, which indicates a weaker first quarter than expected. It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6030,138,13242,9688,37006,3105,36305,3592,13989,3339,225,4486,111,139,69,667,4497,6100,29307,3755,23964,379,2963],"class_list":["post-392824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-again","tag-business","tag-confirms","tag-consecutive","tag-cotality","tag-data","tag-extended","tag-fall","tag-fell","tag-housing","tag-market","tag-month","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-sales","tag-start","tag-still","tag-subdued","tag-third","tag-volumes","tag-year","tag-zealands"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}