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This month we provide update annual forecast for Christchurch, Wellington & Auckland's commercial markets. Generally they reinforce the picture of stabilisation as a pre-cursor to recovery, that we have noted in recent data.

While we might think our markets have been volatile in the last three years, that volatility both in the short term and the long term is low compared to many other commercial property markets, even those much more mature than ours. Often the charts showing rental and capital values in whatever sector of the New Zealand market, can be rather dull. Trends can be easier to spot when rental or capital values are plotted as annual change, rather than actual numbers. A good example of that is the top two charts opposite. They look at the annual change in prime capital values in various categories. The only Christchurch category we can usefully monitor at present is industrial. CBD retail and CBD office are not measurable, and suburban office and retail are temporarily boosted by that lack of CBD activity, and current trends will not be reliable indicators of long term performance in those markets.

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