Property vendors in New Zealand are turning away from private sales and are choosing to engage more with real estate agents, according to the fourth annual Nielsen Online Property Market Trend Report sponsored by realestate.co.nz.

Property agents are solidifying their established position as the preferred method of selling as the volatility of the market has caused punters to lose confidence in their ability to manage and complete their property transaction satisfactorily on their own.

``In the last year, the number of people who said that they would definitely sell privately has dropped to just 13%. People are recognising the value of real estate agents to assist in what is a complex and now frequently quite litigious process with a lot of risk attached to it'', says Alistair Helm, CEO of research sponsor, Realestate.co.nz.

Mr Helm said the research confirmed that the number of buyers on the market was unseasonably high, trends that property website, realestate.co.nz has seen emerging over the past few months. ``We've seen a significant amount of traffic to the website, particularly in the last couple of months which is normally a quiet period. There have been record levels of interest in July, bigger than February which is traditionally a busy period for the property market.''

In July almost 4,500,000 individual sessions were recorded across the top 10 real estate websites - a staggering 1.2 million hours were consumed by property seekers browsing real estate information online.

More analysis of the property market can be found on Realestate.co.nz's Unconditional blog at: www.realestate.co.nz/blog.

Note: The Nielsen Real Estate Market Report is based on a site-intercept survey on New Zealand real estate websites conducted during May and June with a sample size of 1206 respondents and a margin of error of around 3%.

About Realestate.co.nz Realestate.co.nz is the official website of the New Zealand real estate industry, and provides the most comprehensive selection of listings across all categories of real estate. Realestate.co.nz lists over 100,000 properties at any one time, representing over 90% of all listings currently marketed by real estate professionals.