Tauranga and Marlborough were the only parts of New Zealand not to experience an increase in house prices over the November quarter, new data from QV shows.

It has released its latest house price index, which shows prices up 9.5 per cent in the Rotorua district in the quarter, 4.5 per cent in Hastings and 3.2 per cent in Wellington.

But prices were down 0.3 per cent in the Marlborough area and down 0.1 per cent in Tauranga.

The national average is now 3.3 per cent lower than it was at the start of 2023, but up 2.3 per cent over the three months to the end of November.

On an annual basis, just three of the 16 urban centres that QV monitors have recorded growth over the year to date, Rotorua, up 3.2 per cent, Queenstown, 2.1 per cent and Invercargill up 1.5 per cent.

QV operations manager James Wilson says it's a “boring release” but that was probably a good thing.

“It’s not good for anyone to have a big bounce back in values,” he says. “Just north of zero is probably a healthy place to be.

“The residential property market has been a rollercoaster ride since Covid-19 first reared its ugly head on these shores, with more ups and downs than the entire decade prior.

“This year, home values continued to fall for the most part, stabilised, and now appear to be slowly beginning to strengthen once again. But rather than the start of another major uplift in values, I expect we’ll see a return to a more ‘typical’ sort of housing market in the year ahead, with slow growth, and days to sell and listing numbers eventually returning to historic norms.

“This is not a bad thing given some of the economic challenges we all continue to face together as a country.”

He says Marlborough’s price movements were driven by the small number of sales happening in that region.

Tauranga has seen a lift in prices earlier than many centres, because first-home buyers have spotted an opportunity to get into the market ahead of investors, he says.

“In other markets like Auckland, Christchurch and Hamilton, investors have begun to creep in but in Tauranga they kind of haven’t. They've gone ‘let’s just wait and wait for the new year and see what happens in the market’. Combine that with an owner-occupier mindset of ‘wait for the new year’ and no one has really filled the void through the November-December period.”

He says there are reports of would-be vendors, who have been hanging back, now deciding to put their properties on the market after Christmas.

“We will get that across most of the country. The impact that will have will be interesting. The last couple of months we’ve seen some markets that almost felt like they were getting quite hot again and I suspect it's because they haven’t had many listings.

“A bigger group than we have had in the last year or two is competing for less and less so those that are on the market are selling pretty well. When we get more listings come to market it might meet demand for a wee bit.”

He says he expects the market to hold flat for the rest of summer.

“No one is going to know what will happen until the end of summer and we get a read of what the real market health is like.”

-Susan Edmonds/Stuff.