One in Eight New Zealand Resales Now Loses Money as July Sales Drop 10%

REINZ counted 6,090 July sales, down 10% year on year, at a $760,000 median. Cotality says 13.1% of June-quarter resales sold at a loss, the most since 2012.

Two datasets released in New Zealand on 13 August describe the same market from opposite ends. The Real Estate Institute counted 6,090 residential sales in July, down 10.0% on July 2025, at a national median of $760,000 — a fall of just 0.7% over the year, with the House Price Index at 3,550, down 0.4%. Prices, in other words, have barely moved. What has changed is who is willing to transact at them.

Cotality's figures, published the same day, put the share of June-quarter resales that changed hands below their purchase price at 13.1%, the highest since 2012. In early 2022 that share was under 1%.

The stock is building without the listings surging

Total listings stood at 33,252 at the end of July, up 9.3% year on year, while new listings for the month were 7,698, down 0.5%. That combination — flat inflow, rising stock — means properties are simply not clearing. The median time to sell stretched to 50 days from 48. Sellers are holding their price and waiting; buyers are letting them.

Who is taking the losses

The typical loss on a loss-making resale was $60,000, against a median gain of $280,000 for the 86.9% of sellers who came out ahead — figures that exclude agent commission and holding costs, so the real spread is wider on both sides. The geography is stark: 20.9% of Auckland resales lost money, and 18.4% in the Wellington region, against 8.0% in Dunedin and 5.3% in Christchurch.

The decisive variable is when the property was bought. Loss-making sellers had held for a median of 4.3 years, placing their purchase squarely in the 2021-22 peak. Profitable sellers had held for 10.4 years. This is not a market-wide impairment; it is a single cohort of buyers meeting the market again.

Regional medians tell you less than they appear to

The strongest annual gains came from the thinnest markets. West Coast rose 14.7% to a $390,000 median — on 35 sales. Gisborne rose 9.6% to $625,000, on 38 sales. At those volumes a handful of transactions moves the median several percent, and the figures should be read as anecdote, not trend. Marlborough was up 7.1% to $675,000, Waikato 3.4% to $760,000 and Northland 3.1% to $675,000.

REINZ chief executive Lizzy Ryley tied the divergence to the labour market: "Where employment is holding up, the property market is generally holding up, too."

The yield picture

Glopra's New Zealand row, snapshotted 23 July 2026, shows a national average of $3,600 per square metre against a gross rental yield of 4.12% — among the thinnest yields we track anywhere in Asia-Pacific, below Australia's 4.69% and Japan's 4.34%, and barely half the 8.30% our Indonesian row carries. Our bubble risk score is 50 out of 100, in the moderate band. We flag the confidence on this row as Low: New Zealand's comparable per-square-metre inputs are sparser than for most developed markets, so treat the price level as indicative and the REINZ median as the harder number.

Sources: REINZ July 2026 release via Scoop https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU2608/S00121/prices-remain-steady-as-properties-take-longer-to-sell.htm; NewsWire NZ (Cotality data) https://newswire.co.nz/2026/08/house-sales-fall-july-2026-one-in-eight-sellers-loss/

Market data: New Zealand