But what are Auckland’s most “tightly held” residential suburbs? The answers surprised us – we think you’ll be surprised too!
Auckland’s top 10 most tightly held suburbs (for the last two years):

01.  Otara
02.  Point England
03.  Mt Roskill
04.  Mangere
05.  New Windsor
06.  Panmure
07.  Omaha
08.  Mangere East
09.  Lynfield
10.  Clover Park

This “top 10” list is based on CoreLogic data, measuring the percentage of homes in each suburb that have sold in the last 2 years. Our ranking is based on the suburbs that had the fewest transactions, relative to their size. For these suburbs, 5%-7% of homes were sold in the last 2 years. In a street of 100 homes, only a handful would have changed hands over two years, and months could have gone by without a single “for sale” sign.

By comparison, the Auckland average was 11% of homes sold in the last 2 years, ranging right up to 15%-25% for the top 10 most frequently sold suburbs (which generally have a lot of new homes being built and sold).

So what’s really happening here? Are owners in these “tightly held” suburbs keeping their properties because they’re so sought after, or are they just hard to get rid of? We see a couple of different things going on, and we’ve checked our assumptions against various other data.

There’s a cluster of tightly held suburbs in the southwest part of the old ‘Auckland City’ area: Mt Roskill, New Windsor and Lynfield. They’re all close to the new Waterview motorway, which gave these suburbs much better links to the CBD when it opened in mid-2017. These suburbs saw strong price growth in the years leading up to 2017, as the tunnel opening got closer and closer. This new infrastructure was well and truly “priced in” for those suburbs, and homeowners seem to have been hanging on tight for at least the last few years. These suburbs are also in good school zones: Lynfield College and Mt Roskill Grammar.

On the other hand, owner-occupiers in these suburbs find that it’s a big jump to the next rung on the property ladder – and they can find themselves “locked in”. Just a little closer to the city centre, homes get much more expensive: a jump of at least $100,000 to shift to the next suburb.

Point England and Panmure are quite a different story. They’re all part of the Tamaki redevelopment now underway in Glen Innes. However, while Glen Innes is seeing a lot of new housing being built, and a lot of homes changing hands as a result, Point England and Panmure will have longer to wait until they see the same process. In the meantime, a lot of homes are being held for redevelopment by the Tamaki Redevelopment Company and therefore aren’t available for sale. Moving up the ladder from these suburbs is also another big jump, again a case of locked in rather than tightly held.

Omaha is an outlier – literally as well as in the data – as it’s 75 kilometres from central Auckland, and it’s mainly a holiday home area. Demand for holiday homes is very cyclical, and the market can dry up during recessions. We think Omaha’s presence in this list may be a blip in the data, as other holiday home areas in Auckland haven’t seen the same trends. Of course, holiday homes are often seen as somewhere to retire in the future – but most owners are still busy working to pay off the Omaha beach house!

Lastly, we’ve got a cluster of ‘tightly held’ suburbs in south Auckland – Mangere, Mangere East, Otara and Clover Park. We think there’s yet another explanation for these suburbs: they’re all lower-income areas, with a high proportion of renting households. This means many homes are owned by investors. Residential investors have been much less active in the Auckland market in the last couple of years, and that’s partly because of new LVRs (loan to value restrictions), and partly because they don’t expect as much capital gain in the future. These suburbs give some of the best rental yields in Auckland and are some of the most ‘affordable’ for owner-occupiers, but again it’s a big jump if you want to move up the “property ladder” to a more expensive neighbouring suburb, again a case of locked in owner-occupiers.