The city's largest real estate agency group, Barfoot & Thompson has informed that April was comparatively strong month for house sales volume and said that the strength is another encouraging sign of market recovery.

809 sales in April at an average price of NZ$502,726 was reported by Barfoot and Thompson.

The sales recorded in the year 2006 and 2007 were still higher than the number of sales over the month, which recorded 829 and 899, respectively. In April 2008 the sales were 453 recorded by Barfoots.
 
Barfoots told that in March the sales dropped from 924 due to the traditional seasonal downturn in April. The average price over the month was high 2% from March however it was still low by 3% from April 2008 and 5.6% from 2007.

Managing Director Peter Thompson said, “Traditionally April sales volume and prices can fall away markedly compared to March.”

(Via TopNews New Zealand. Contributed by Manish Verma)