One city bucks the trend with house price growth as NZ market stabilises

Monday, 22 September 2025

Christchurch was the only major city to show a three-year rise in prices since the pandemic property market highs.

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While the Auckland and Wellington housing markets continue to slump, Christchurch is the stand-out as the only major city with positive growth over the past three years.

Ray White’s senior data analyst Atom Go Tian has looked at the post-pandemic figures for each of the major cities, and found Christchurch has the cheapest house prices for a metropolitan city. It was also the only one showing growth: 4.8% in the last year and 5.8% in the last three.

Tauranga was the only other city with positive growth in the last year with 5.6% ‒ but it had a three-year loss of 7%, which Tian said was an indication its current growth was catchup recovery.

The post-pandemic housing market correction then shows a slow climb out of the drop, Ray White’s Atom Go Tian said.

Tian said the market appeared to be in a rare period of equilibrium, with low interest rates that favoured buyers in the lower end of the market.

“Whereas during the pandemic we saw significant speculative demand from investment buyers, the market is now characterised by people buying houses for their intrinsic value rather than their potential as assets.”

He said the huge surge in the housing market during the pandemic drove prices to unsustainable levels, followed by a correction that saw sales collapse by 41%, listings fall 20% and prices drop by 19%.

“The beginning of 2023 marked the start of the recovery phase as prices stabilised followed shortly after by increases in both sales and listings.”

The August monthly median house price of $761,000 nationally was firmly in the same range seen for the last two-and-a-half years.

“Listings returned to pandemic peak levels early in 2025 and have plateaued since, with the 12-month rolling count sitting at 110,000. Meanwhile, sales experienced their first flat month since the 2023 recovery began,” he said.

Tian said sales peaked at 78,000 between July 2024 and 2025. He said that was up 34% from the corrective slump after the post-pandemic highs.

In the last year, sales again hit 78,000, the first time in 29 months sales failed to increase.

“This plateau comes despite the Reserve Bank of New Zealand lowering its Official Cash Rate by 25 basis points to 3% at its August 2025 meeting,” he said.

In the regions, only five out of 16 showed both positive one-year and three-year house price growth, with Gisborne showing a massive 21% three-year jump ‒ 11.3% of that in the last year.

The others were Southland, the West Coast, Nelson and Canterbury. All have median house prices well below the national average.

The most expensive regions ‒ Auckland, Bay of Plenty, Waikato and Wellington ‒ showed the largest long-term decrease in prices with no signs of sustained increase, with Wellington region showing by far the largest one-year drop of 6.9%.

Tian said it was arguably a healthy property market with signs of maturing.

“Instead of returning to boom conditions, New Zealand has stabilised as a functioning market that serves actual housing needs rather than investment returns, which is arguably healthier even if less exciting for growth expectations.”

He said with indicators now returned to healthy levels, the question was how long that will continue.