Tell people you’re selling without an agent and someone will warn you that the buyers won’t come. The listing will sit. You’ll relist with an agency by winter. It’s the industry’s second-favourite warning, right behind “you’ll get less”, and it has one weakness: there’s a dataset that answers it directly. So, do private house sales work in NZ?
In 2024, privately listed New Zealand homes sold in a median of 71 days, four days faster than the 75-day median for agent listings, according to Cotality data reported by RNZ in July 2025. A clear majority of private listings sell, and the buyers who bought them plainly had no problem dealing with an owner. The honest caveat is that fewer private listings sell than agent listings overall, and the reasons for that gap are fixable.
Do private house sales work in NZ? The speed numbers say yes
There’s exactly one NZ dataset comparing private and agent sales: Cotality’s (the analytics firm formerly known as CoreLogic), reported by RNZ on 15 July 2025. For 2024 it shows private listings selling in a median 71 days on the market against 75 for agent listings. Four days quicker, in the owners’ favour.
Private sales were also 7.6 per cent of the market that year (same dataset), which is thousands of homes changing hands without an agency in the middle. And the buyers were never hard to find: as MoneyHub’s private-selling guide puts it (checked July 2026), buyers hunt on Trade Me and are increasingly familiar with the concept of a private sale. Buyers buy houses, not agents.
The honest number: completion rates
The completion figures are the part a fair write-up can’t skip. Over the past decade, 76 per cent of agent-listed properties sold, against 65.1 per cent of private listings (Cotality via RNZ, July 2025). In 2024 specifically it was 65 per cent against 52.8. Private listings are less likely to get across the line, and that gap has held for years.
Keep the agent column in view too, though: 65 per cent completion in 2024 means roughly a third of agent-listed homes didn’t sell either. Failing to find a buyer in a slow market is a market problem before it’s a channel problem; private listings just wear more of it.
Look at what sits behind it, though. Cotality’s own head of research cautioned that its private-versus-agent comparisons can reflect a different mix of properties being sold, and the same caution applies to completion as to price. More telling are the failure causes the industry itself names: the RNZ piece carries agents describing private sellers who launch at aspirational prices and end up correcting them, week by week, in public. Add the familiar DIY sins, dim phone photos and unanswered enquiries, and you have a full explanation that never once requires a buyer boycott.
The boycott theory also has a testable implication. If buyers refused to deal with private sellers, the private listings that did sell would take longer to find their buyer. In 2024 they took less time. Whatever holds back the listings that fail, it happens at the preparation and pricing end, and both of those can be fixed by a seller who does the homework, or buys it done.
What the 2021-to-2024 flip actually tells you
Roll back to the overheated market of 2021 and the same dataset looks entirely different: agent sales took a median of 24 days and private sales took 40. Three years later that gap had closed and then reversed.
The flip is the most useful fact in the whole dataset, because it shows the sales channel wasn’t setting the pace. Market conditions were. In a frenzy, everything sells fast and an agency’s buyer queue looks decisive; in a flat year, every listing waits for the same scarce buyers, and the owner who answers questions at 8pm gives nothing away to a salesperson juggling thirty listings. If channel choice drove outcomes, the ranking would survive a market cycle. It didn’t survive one.
What actually decides whether a private sale works
Ask what separates the private listings that sell from the ones that expire and every source lands on the same short list: a price built on what actually sold nearby, photography that survives a phone screen, a listing where the buyers already are, and enquiries followed up promptly. That list is the completion gap, and every line of it can be learned or bought for a fraction of a commission.
None of it is exotic, either. The comparable-sales data sits free on the property portals, photographers publish their rates, and Trade Me takes private listings directly, with its fees on a public schedule (checked July 2026). The tools were always the easy part; what most private sellers have lacked is a process that strings them together.
We’ve unpacked the price side, including the caveats that don’t flatter private selling, in our companion piece on whether private sellers get less. The short version there matches the version here: the saving is certain, the price premium is unproven, and preparation is what closes the completion gap.
Closing that gap at a flat fee is the whole reason Celby exists: professional photography, the Trade Me listing, a conveyancing lawyer, and a process that tells you what’s next, for $8,000.
The 2024 numbers deserve the last word. Buyers came for the house, and in the most recent full year of data they bought it a little faster when the owner was the one selling it.
Celby is not a licensed real estate agent. You’re selling your property privately, and all decisions about your sale are your own.
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