Wellington has toppled Auckland as the country’s hottest housing market, and outranked it on a list of the world’s fastest growing cities for house prices.
According to Knight Frank, a global property consultancy, Wellington house prices in the September quarter soared 17 per cent on the same period last year, compared to Auckland’s 15 per cent.
The agency’s global residential cities Index tracks house prices every quarter across 150 cities worldwide.
In overtaking Auckland, Wellington took a title the City of Sails held for eight years.
It was also listed as 16th on the list for annual house price gains, just below Norway’s Oslo and Canada’s Victoria, and just above the burgeoning Turkish metropolis of Istanbul.
However, Auckland came in at 24th, with a 15.4 per cent price gain.
The world’s most rapidly growing housing market was Nanjing, China, where prices rose nearly 43 per cent in just a year, outdoing even Shanghai’s red-hot house price increases of 39 per cent.
The first non-Chinese city on the list was Vancouver at ninth place, where prices have risen 24 per cent. Hit with a foreign investor tax recently, Knight Frank said Vancouver’s position was less to do with sliding house prices and more due to the overpowering ascent of the Chinese cities.
In contrast, other global cities managed more modest gains: 9.2 per cent in London (36th); 6.9 per cent in Melbourne (55th) and 1.8 per cent in New York (102nd).
Sydney, often seen as an Australian counterpart to Auckland’s housing market, ranked 90th for house price growth of 3.2 per cent.
Globally, Asia had the strongest housing prices with a pan-regional gain of 12.7 per cent, followed by the Middle East (9.8 per cent), and North America (6.1 per cent).
Australasia saw prices rise 5 per cent and Europe and Latin America followed with 3.7 per cent and 3.4 per cent.
House prices in Africa rose only 0.3 per cent, while they plunged 5 per cent in Russia and the CIS.
