NZ property prices: Wellington, Auckland plunge from 2022 peak

Tuesday, 6 January 2026

Wellington’s economic miseries are writ large in its property prices with the median property value ending 2025 a full 25.4% lower than its 2022 peak.

Auckland hasn’t fared much better, according to figures calculated by property intelligence company Cotality. It remains a city where the median house is worth just over $1 million, but December ended with that down 23.4% from its 2022 peak.

Far happier are owners in Christchurch where the median price ended the year 3.6% lower than at its peak.

Kelvin Davidson, chief property economist from Cotality, said the figures were not adjusted for inflation and increase in incomes.

But his “finger in the air” prediction for 2026 was growth in median prices of “perhaps 5%”.

However, he said Auckland and Wellington were likely to remain “soggy”, which would mean the rest of the country would have to do some heavy lifting.

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“As with Auckland, a cautious attitude seems to be pervading the Wellington housing market,” Davidson said.

First home buyers remained active, but in an election year, it was possible Wellington’s property values continued to tread water, Davidson said.

Auckland, where town house-building had been a factor in dropping the median, represented 35% to 40% of the property market, Davidson said, so the 5% prediction was at the top end of likely outcomes.

Early indicators suggested lower home loan rates and a recovering economy would drive some house price growth, Davidson said.

But he noted that 2026 was an election year, and regulation, including around loan to value and debt-to-income limits on bank lending would be debated, as would a possible expansion on capital gains taxation to cover more property sales.

The past 12 months have seen different parts of the country experiencing different economic conditions, with Christchurch buoyed up by high dairy prices.

Over the past 12 months, the median price of a home in Christchurch rose by 2.6%, and Tauranga saw a 1% rise.

In the deep south, the median price of a home in Invercargill ended 2025 at a new record high, Cotality recorded.

However, the median price fell 2.6% in Auckland, and 2% in Wellington, and it was down 1.2% in Hamilton, and 0.3% in Dunedin.

The falls were not even across cities and regions though.

In Wellington, the median price on the Kapiti Coast fell by 3.4% in the past 12 months, while Wellington city was down by 1.9%.

Davidson said housing affordability had improved for most buyers, but that had come at a price for the relatively small number of mostly first-home buyers who got onto the housing ladder around the peak of the market.

Banks do not report on how many of their mortgages are in negative equity, a term that means a borrower owes more on their home loan than the property is actually worth.

The most recent estimate of negative equity produced by the Reserve Bank Te Pūtea Matua was in its November 2024 Financial Stability Report in which it estimated that “less than 2% of the current stock of lending is to borrowers in negative equity”.

That was partly a result of Reserve Bank limits on low-deposit loans by banks, Davidson said.

The Reserve Bank said that the 2022 peak was relatively brief meaning only a limited proportion of buyers from recent years purchased their properties at prices close to the peak.

Davidson said the negative equity would be concentrated in first home buyers.

Reserve Bank data shows that in 2021 and 2022 around the peak, first home buyers borrowing more than 80% of the value of the properties they were buying paid a combined $10.5 billion of homes.

Total bank mortgage lending is around $388 billion.