10 Nov 2014

Clamour for valuations crashes site

8:45 pm on 10 November 2014

Thousands of Aucklanders anxious to see the council's new capital valuations of their properties have crashed its website.

The valuations were released on its website today.

The council re-booted the website every 30 minutes to get it back up.

It is only the second time the council has uploaded around 500,000 valuations of individual properties on to its website.

Real Estate Institute of New Zealand chief executive Helen O'Sullivan said Auckland homeowners had never been more interested in the valuations of their properties and could expect a big jump in excess of 10 percent.

A vice president at software developer Vend, Ben Gracewood, said the Auckland Council was unprepared.

"I think you can put it down to unexpected load," he said.

"In the hot property market, the number of people wanting to check these things ... you could probably say easily 100,000, perhaps a million times, more people wanting to do this than would want to visit the exciting Auckland Council website on any other given day."

The website has been working intermittently today following its initial crash.