Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring some data with QlikSense using OpenData sets – for today I’ll be using some data from Quotable Value (QV) to take a look at the Auckland House Prices to see how different they are to the rest of NZ and whether the recent price rises are out of character for the time of year.
There’s been a lot in the news about the increasing house prices in Auckland and we were curious as to whether this was out of character for the time of year or just a normal trend for Auckland, so as always when our curiosity piqued, we had to find an answer. To understand it better, I’ve broken it down into the house price trends, but more importantly the percentage increase to understand whether it’s unusual for this time of year.
Let’s start off with a comparison of Auckland to the rest of NZ. The Auckland prices are rising at a much higher rate, with Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin staying fairly similar compared to Auckland. The Christchurch figures increased steadily between 2012 and 2013, likely to be influenced by the earthquakes and recovery effort then stabilising in the last two years, although I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for the two blips. The NZ average is trending up, heavily influenced by those rising Auckland prices.
The percentage uplift for Auckland over the last 6 months is the highest it’s been over the 4 years of data we have, looking at the trend so far it seems the increase is trending up at a much higher percentage than previously, with the highest increase from August to September 2015 over our entire data set; January 2012-October 2015.
Seasonal variations also have an impact on Auckland prices. Same as previous years we can see that 2015 has seen an increase at the start of Autumn, it’s a similar story for the spring months. This seems to be the natural pattern for increasing house prices in Auckland. However, we can see in 2015 that the percentage uplift is significantly higher than previous years, although 2012 had a higher increase rate than 2013-2014.
In summary, the increase of house prices is following a similar pattern to previous years at a much higher rate. 2012 saw a much higher increase percentage than the two subsequent years, so this could suggest a strong 2015 with a slowdown in 2016/17 and a repeating pattern beyond, although we don’t have more data to confirm this it’ll be interesting to see if this pattern emerges; one strong year followed by slower price increases subsequently. Only time will tell…
Over the coming weeks I’ll be sourcing some new data and exploring QlikSense further to see what awesome visualisations it can produce. If you have any interesting questions you’d like answered, I’ll see what I can do to source the data, just leave me a comment below.
Keep exploring! Daniel.
Data Source: Quotable Value https://www.qv.co.nz/resources/monthly-residential-value-index