If you want a broader view of house prices around New Zealand, keep reading below. You’ll learn where the most and least expensive houses are and how the data is calculated.

If you have a question, write your questions or thoughts in the comments section below.

New Zealand's average house price is $902,414 (Dec 2024)

The average house price in NZ is currently $902,414 as at December 2024. This is down from the $905,070 12 months ago.

That means that house prices are down $2,657 over that time.

If you’re looking to buy one of the cheapest houses in the country you need to go to the Manawatu-Wanganui region.

The cheapest house prices in New Zealand are located there according to December 2024 data.

The 3 cheapest districts across New Zealand are:

• Ruapehu District. The average price there is $361,465.
• Waitomo District. The average price there is $363,000.
• Buller District. The average price there is $377,808.

At the other end of the scale, the 3 most expensive areas have average house prices in the 7 figures. The 3 most expensive areas are:

• Queenstown-Lakes District. The average price there is $1,821,424.
• Auckland. The average price there is $1,245,290.
• Thames-Coromandel District. The average price there is $1,155,195.

If you Google “average house price” you will find the figures differ slightly, depending on who you talk to.

Why? It’s all down to the data used.

For instance, the data for this article was taken from QV, and the prices shown will be slightly different from other sources, for example CoreLogic and REINZ.

There are a few reasons for this and it comes down to how the data is calculated.

For starters QV creates its average by:

• Using an algorithm to create an e-value for every property within a council area
• They then take the average (mean) of those e-values for each area

CoreLogic used to follow a similar process. But, now they use a house price index. So the numbers they report will be different.

Next is REINZ, which is another very popular data source. They calculate their data by:

• Looking at the properties that sold over the prior month
• Taking the median price (the middle one) of all properties sold

This is different from QV because:

• REINZ data takes into account only the properties that were sold, whereas QV takes into account every property within an area
• REINZ data is based on actual sale prices, whereas QV is based on an estimated value of each property
• REINZ takes the middle number (the median) of the property sales prices. QV use a simple average (mean).

The effect of this is that REINZ median sale prices are more volatile (there will be more variation month to month).

REINZ reported median sale prices are also typically lower than QV’s data.

For example, while QV said New Zealand’s average price was $902,414, REINZ put the median sale price at $750,000.

Both are right, but there is a $152,414 difference between what QV and REINZ Price say what the average house price is.

This is important to bear in mind as you are using different sources to figure out the average price for an area.