House sales and prices hardly reduced by lockdown

Barfoot & Thompson’s sales for August at 1,020 were down 17% on July, but were not far off the 1,055 properties sold in August last year.

However, they were significantly down on the level of trading experienced in the previous three months.

The real estate company’s managing director Peter Thompson says if the same period last year is excluded, when the market was still recovering from a two-month lockdown, sales were more than 20% higher than normally achieved in August.

Sales and prices stood up extremely well during the first two weeks of the lockdown.