Companies that buy and sell gold in New Zealand have seen a boom as people look to capitalise on recent record high gold prices.
Gold peaked earlier this month, trading at $7,650 per ounce on 17 October.
In recent days those prices have taken a tumble, with gold trading at $6,950 per ounce on Tuesday.
Director at the Village Goldsmith, Chris Benham said with the surge in gold prices they’d seen an increase in clients wanting to trade their gold in.
“We’re seeing a number of [clients] recognising the significant value in the gold that they hold in their drawer that they don’t wear and essentially just cashing that in for either a credit to buy new jewellery or to just take the cash and use that for just day-to-day living expenses.”
He said gold had historically always been a trusted store of value.
“It’s sort of a tangible thing that people know and it’s historically consistently gone up over time,” he said.
“I think with what’s happening globally in terms of political tensions and so forth, often resort back to gold as a traditional store of value and we’re certainly seeing that at the moment.”
He said for people looking at their jewellery and wondering if it might be worth something, two indicators they could check were the stamp inside which would tell them the caret weight of the gold, and also the weight of the jewellery itself, how many grams it was.
Benham said they ran people’s items through an X-ray machine that analyses the precious metals and alloys within it.
“From there we would take the carat weight of that gold – so say for example it is 18 carat gold – we would then apply that against the current spot rate.
“What we’re seeing at the moment is that people are really surprised when they bring that jewellery in, just how much that those special items are worth.”
Director of Sona Sansaar, Harish Lodhia said they’d seen an increase in the number of people interesting in investing in gold due to the price hype, but he said the amounts people were buying were less.
“Last year this time I would have been selling 100 gram bars, but the same money is 1761761605 only buying them 50 gram bars,” he said.
“They’re still investing, but not the quantities, which they would have preferred.”
He said he was seeing both interest in purchasing gold bars and gold jewellery.
Goldie, a start up where people can invest in a share of a gold bar, has 1kg gold bars.
Two years ago, it would have taken around 10 1kg bars to make up a million dollars in gold, but nowadays it would only take around five.
Goldie founder Campbell Maclachlan said it showed how gold prices had grown and the benefit of investing in it.
“What’s been great to see is that financial literacy of our investors, investing more and more, not necessarily cashing out,” he said.
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