Television has long had an affinity with the real estate industry and property - we had the very successful series more than 15 years ago of Location Location Location which shot Michael Boulgaris to prominence and of course more recently Agent Anna. Then of course renovation of property is compulsive viewing with The Block; and from the UK who has not followed the path of Kirsty & Phil in the UK property programme Location Location Location. Property and the transaction of property makes for great TV - great real life drama, a slice of fantasy escapism and human emotions.
So it is not surprising that the UK has cooked up a new documentary series following the day to day lives of real estate agents. Aired earlier this month in the UK on BBC2 the first episode of Under Offer is available on You Tube for us kiwi's to watch.
I watched this first hour long episode with great interest and found it's excellent real life documentary style very watchable, whether you are in the industry or have a casual interest, because who cannot be interested in the lives of other, especially in such a public industry.
The Guardian review was most complementary stating "Under Offer: Estate Agents on the Job could be the most flattering TV portrait of estate agents yet" - I agree, the choice of agents shows a wide diversity and in so doing highlights the very many challenges encountered everyday in the profession.
I found it interesting that one of the most retweeted comment behind the hashtag of #UnderOffer was "It pays to have a sense of humour as an agent"
Have a watch and see what you think - share your views and like me await the future episodes to come.
I was surprised by the statement made by Westpac's Chief Economist today
It is impossible to tell what is really going on with house prices
His comments refer to the growing volatility in house price measures, especially from the latest REINZ stats of both median price and stratified median price index. The latter a measure designed to provide a more accurate and stable measure of prices as it balances out the impact of high price suburbs vs. low price suburbs to ensure neither unduly skews the data.
This chart above shows the trend in both median and stratified price over the past 7 years - most noticeable is the rise of the recent 3 years. You can also see the volatility in recent months from what has historically been a smoother trend in stratified price measure as seen in the red line.
In the Auckland market the volatility is more pronounced and also what is very striking is the direct correlation of prices (especially the median price) with the timeline of the implementation of the Reserve Bank LVR restriction.
The impact after the 1st October implementation has seen median price shoot up directly as a result of the significant fall in sales of lower priced property thereby pushing the median price up. The fall in January prices is a seasonal issue which can be seen regularly through the past years, although the scale of the fall this year is surprising.
As Westpac's Chief Economist Dominick Stephens says in his Home Truths report for April the fundamental issue is that the raw data of house prices is not a case of matching apples with apples, more its an apples with oranges comparison. On the REINZ Stratified House Price Index (HPI) he makes these comments reflective of the charts above:
As I have written in the past I believe that REINZ should take on the challenge of collecting and aggregating more granular statistics on property sales - they are in the best position to do so as they are the incorporated society with almost all real estate agents as members who collect data on every sale in NZ at the time the unconditional agreement is reached.
Even without changing any collection process they could today provide far more accurate and valuable information on property prices.
One of the fundamental problems with there data reporting today is that they currently aggregate all property types together - be it a 1 bedroom unit, a studio apartment, a 5 bedroom home or a 20 hectare lifestyle property - to the Real Estate Institute they are all just a house - that is dumb!
Take a look at the divergent make up of property in Auckland across the major districts as defined by REINZ as seen from the composition of listings on Realestate.co.nz today.
Certainly across Auckland two thirds of properties for sale are houses, but within Auckland city over 1 in 3 of all properties are apartments. One in ten of all properties on the market across the Auckland region are units or townhouses - these certainly have a very different price profile than regular houses or lifestyle properties. In the outer areas of Auckland Lifestyle properties make up more than a quarter of properties. Think on the fact that within Manukau a $4m lifestyle property in Whitford is seen by REINZ as the 'same' as a $219,000 single bedroom unit in Papatoetoe.
All sales records remitted to the data system at REINZ currently have the following fields (some of which are completed by the selling agent - certainly all should be mandatory)
- Unit Number
- House Number
- Road Name
- Suburb
- List Price
- Sale Price
- List date
- Agreement date
- Unconditional date
- Type - Residential House / Apartment / Home & Income / Unit / Lifestyle
- Bedrooms
- Land Area
- Floor Area
- Valuation
- Valuation Year
This is the data set for existing data - upon this set of data, better more accurate sales and sale price analysis could be undertaken to allow economists, property buyers, property sellers, investors, real estate agents and other could make better informed decisions.
Maybe then we could avoid the statement that an Economist feels that its virtually impossible to know what is going on with property prices.
This week you could not have missed the annual ritual of creating April Fool's jokes to bring some brevity and lightness to the daily news. For me the favourite has to be the proposal that should Scotland decide to vote yes in their referendum on Independence in September then they would instigate a more to switch to driving on the right from 2017.. with all the consequential challenges that would create! Added to this all road signs would be re-written replacing the 'M' motorway reference to 'S' for Scotland naturally and 'A' roads will be called 'N' for National roads. I commend the Guardian for creating this great spoof - apparently one of 4 such spoofs based around Scottish Independence.
Spoofs aside the other April's Fool joke that caught my eye was of more relevant for property addicts and followers of digital real estate marketing. Trulia in the US produced a great piece of marketing - they produced a completely new site which demonstrated a great brand extension - from property searching, to searching for a partner for those in the real estate industry - welcome to Truluvia
Totally convincing, although these days developing such websites are not a massive piece of work, the concept is smart marketing in my mind. I love the simple idea that match-making can be based around the specialisation of real estate agents - Trulia's target customers. The Trulia brand has always been distinctive for being design based, warm, friendly, a true partner in the real estate process.
There is also a smart call-to-action from this site which not surprising is not that 'deep' in content - you get to update your profile on Trulia, thereby driving users to engage with the main Trulia site.
I think smart marketing speaks these days to demonstrating a genuine personality, showing a personal connection with your customers and being prepared to laugh a little at yourself, especially when the service you provide is so emotionally engaging. Smart work by Trulia!
