Auckland house sales fell 18 percent in April as Barfoot & Thompson stock hit an 18-year high

Auckland’s autumn property market has fallen flat. Barfoot & Thompson, the agency that handles roughly a third of all residential sales across the country’s biggest housing market, sold 688 properties in April. That is down 18 percent on April 2025 and the lowest April tally since 2023, according to the agency’s monthly figures released this week.

The slowdown extends beyond volume. The median selling price slid to $955,250, a $74,750 drop on March and a 7.3 percent fall in a single month. The average sale price followed, dipping to $1,131,246 from $1,176,572. Both figures are still up slightly on a year ago, by 2.3 percent and 1.9 percent respectively, but the momentum that built through summer evaporated as soon as Easter passed.

What stands out is the supply side. Barfoot took 1,744 new listings during the month, the highest April figure in 21 years and 10.5 percent up on April 2025. Total stock at month-end reached 6,356 properties, a level not seen in any April for 18 years. That mismatch, more sellers turning up just as fewer buyers are willing to commit, is the textbook definition of a buyer’s market.

Managing director Peter Thompson urged caution about reading too much into a single month. “With school holidays, Easter and Anzac Day all falling across the period, activity typically softens from the March peak, making month-on-month comparisons less reliable than long term trends,” he said.

Even so, the wider weather around the property market is the worst it has looked in years. Westpac NZ released its half-year results on the same day. Net profit came in at $545 million for the six months to March, up 4 percent on the same period a year earlier but down 19 percent on the previous half. Bad-debt provisions ticked up from $33 million to $37 million. The bank’s economists are now picking the economy will shrink 0.4 percent in the June quarter.

Chief executive Catherine McGrath said unemployment was forecast to peak at 5.6 percent and inflation to climb to 4.5 percent, both pinned on the oil shock that has followed the renewed Middle East conflict. She acknowledged the strain on households and businesses, particularly in transport, manufacturing, agriculture and automotive sectors, and said households were “adapting well” despite the cost pressures. The bank has earmarked $100 million in dedicated lending support for small and medium businesses caught in the fuel squeeze, of which roughly $33 million has been drawn down so far.

For house buyers and sellers, the combination of higher unemployment forecasts, weaker GDP and rising fuel costs is pulling in the same direction. Buyers are nervous about job security and weekly outgoings. Sellers are listing anyway, either because they need to move, because they want to lock in capital values that look fragile, or because investors who watched property go sideways for three years are choosing to redeploy elsewhere.

The picture is not uniformly grim. Year-on-year prices remain in positive territory. Banks approved nearly $1 billion in low-equity mortgages to first-home buyers in March, the most in 12 years. Most of the recent half-year banking results have shown lending books still growing modestly. The question is whether that resilience holds through winter or whether April’s stock build-up forces sellers to keep cutting prices to clear inventory.

Auckland matters disproportionately because it sets the tone for the rest of the country. Roughly one in three New Zealand homes change hands in the wider Auckland region. When the country’s largest agency sells almost a fifth fewer properties than the same month a year earlier, while taking on a record run of new listings, the rest of the country’s autumn data, due over the next fortnight from REINZ and CoreLogic, will almost certainly reflect a similar pattern.

The shape of the next few months hinges on three things. Whether the Reserve Bank, with inflation creeping back above 4 percent, can still deliver the rate cuts the market was pricing in earlier in the year. Whether oil prices ease as the Middle East situation moves past its current peak. And whether wage growth keeps pace with the rising cost of living long enough for buyers to feel safe walking back into open homes.

For now, anyone selling an Auckland property in May is competing with more rivals than they have seen in nearly two decades. Anyone buying has more choice, more time and more leverage than they have had in a long time. The agency’s own framing is that one month does not make a trend. The numbers underneath the framing tell a clearer story.

Have you been watching the Auckland property market closely, either as a buyer, a seller or an owner-occupier? Are open homes feeling quieter or busier in your part of the city? Drop a comment below and tell us what you are seeing on the ground.