Property sales are still way down

You wouldn’t know it from the fairly breathless media coverage on property prices – i.e. mostly going up – but property sales in total are still running at a fraction – about half – what they were about a year ago, pre-pandemic. Typicallly, we expected to see 80-90,000 property transactions each month – now we’re running at 40-60k, in spite of the capital gains tax incentive that is due to end at the end of March. Maybe there will be another sudden rush like there was in March 2016, when there were a record 143k. See the monthly totals and by property type here.