Potential holiday home purchasers appear to be spoilt for choice in popular South Island holiday towns, with so many properties on the market it will realistically take several years to clear the listings.
This week, the Otago Daily Times reported 27 properties in Naseby - almost 10% of all the properties in the township - were on the market. A real estate agent estimated 90% of those were holiday homes.
Agents reported a similar situation in holiday spots such as Twizel, Moeraki, Hawea, Clyde, Kaka Point and Toko Mouth.
Agent Murray Taylor, who has a crib at Toko Mouth and has bought and sold properties there for many years, said eight of the 70 cribs in the village were on the market, well up on the one or two usually for sale at any time. Rising lease, rates and insurance costs had caused some older owners to re-evaluate their positions, he said.
The number of properties for sale in Twizel is the highest in five years. Agent Frank Dellabarca said about a quarter of holiday homes in the town were owned by Christchurch people and many were opting to sell, to either consolidate their financial positions or repair their family homes after the September earthquake.
In what seemed to be the exception, listings and sales in Otematata and Omarama in the Waitaki Valley had remained steady, agent Tony Spivey, of Oamaru, said. He put that down to the area being a family destination with affordable holiday homes.
The glut of holiday homes available has been caused by a combination of more vendors and fewer buyers, agents said.
Some suggested vendors hit by tougher economic times wanted to quit their second home to reduce expenses and put money back in their pockets.
Many had families scattered throughout New Zealand and the world who were unable to use holiday homes as regularly as in the past, they said.
Several said the slow housing market, banks being more cautious about lending, buyers being more cautious about borrowing, and lower sales prices over the past two years meant properties were taking much longer to sell. However, many holiday home vendors were prepared to sit and wait for a buyer rather than take unsold homes off the market, and that had led to more properties being listed at the same time.
The combination of more listings and fewer buyers had led to an oversupply that, in some places, would take years to clear, Harcourts director Kelvin Collins, of Queenstown, said.
In Moeraki, for example, more than 20 properties were listed on the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand website but fewer than a handful changed hands annually, he said.
REINZ figures showed three properties were sold in the seaside village in 2009 and only two last year.
"Right there, you have have five years' supply before anything new comes on the market. And it is a similar story in other places," he said.
Sales volumes across the entire residential property market were about half of what they were three or four years ago, Mr Collins said.
He did not expect that to change quickly.
"I think these volumes are the new norm, at least for a while."
Unlike principal family homes, which continued to turn over for a variety of reasons such as changes in family circumstances or new job opportunities, holiday home buyers and sellers did not face the same urgency to complete a transaction, he said.
"Because people don't live in a holiday house all the time, there isn't the urgency to sell ... and because prices aren't going up, buyers don't have to rush into making a decision, as they would have had to do a few years ago."
Real Estate Institute of New Zealand Otago regional director Elizabeth Nidd, of Dunedin, said that along with the rest of the property market, prices for holiday homes had declined from the peak of about two years ago.
Some holiday homes were sitting on the market because vendors still expected to achieve 2008 prices.
Those vendors were in "extreme land", she said. "There is still demand for holiday homes, at the right price. However, the right price is probably a price vendors would say is a bargain."
