The 2018 year ended with a fizz rather than a bang for the Real Estate Industry

The Real Estate Institute says the lowest number of residential properties were sold for the month of December in seven years.

The regions with the largest annual drops are Auckland, down just over 24 percent, Taranaki, down 23 percent and Wellington, down 16 percent.

REINZ CEO, Bindi Norwell , says it's usually a quiet month, as people focus on Christmas holidays, but December 2018 was extremely quiet.

She says there were fewer properties to buy and there's talk of people having listed their properties before the foreign buyer ban came in, in October.