As I was driving to Royal Palm Beach yesterday afternoon to drop my beautiful little boy home to his mum after a fantastic weekend, I noticed that there are a lot more for sale signs out again.

I decided to take a bit of a tour around some of the areas that have traditionally favoured the investment market and it seems there are more signs in these areas as well.

Could it be that news of tax reform is scaring a lot of people out of the investment market or is it just the usual Christmas rush with people taking the opportunity to list their homes when the weather is warm and everyone wants to move to the beach?

Certainly if you wanted to sell, now is a great time, as according to one article I read over the last week approximately 14,000 new houses a year are being built, but 25,000 were needed to match population growth. This means more demand than supply could be one of the reasons why prices, as seen by the Real Estate Institutes new figures, have inched up sooner than many people might have thought.

The Real Estate Institute released new figures which show that the current median price for a home in NZ is now $355,000 topping the previous peak of $352,000 which was hit in September of 2007, however, these numbers could be quite short lived as funding is still very difficult for a nation that has a huge number of small businesses and self employed people.

So is this property bonanza flowing through to the Bay of Plenty area? Very likely as I believe we still have one of the more popular places in the country to live in and people are still moving to the Bay in large numbers.

Is it the right time to be selling? That's up to you, however, I can say this, waiting to get a few extra dollars in price may actually cost you more than you think, for example, in the last year the median house price went up by 6 per cent, according to those same figures released by the REINZ, yet many peoples' mortgages are fixed at rates a lot higher than that to this the possibility that you are buying and selling in the same market, so even if you wait for a higher price it just means the property you buy next is going to be more expensive.