Weekly Market Update - 22nd May 2017
By | 22nd May 17

The Melbourne market continues to perform solidly with a clearance rate of 80% from a larger volume of 981 auctions. There doesn’t seem to be a slow down in Melbourne’s market yet and I think our peak levels are still a fair way off for houses. It can be cheaper to own at the moment than to rent with interest rates at record lows and many home buyers being able to get rates at around 5%. In many of Melbourne’s middle suburbs, it can be cheaper to actually take out a mortgage than to pay rent money, which many people see as dead money. Read our comments in Scott Carbine’s article here.

A lot of suburbs in the last few years have started to undergo gentrification where young families and young professionals have started to move into those areas and these suburbs have started to become more trendy with more amenities, cafes and boutique shops lining the streets. We have seen that happen in the North where firstly Reservoir underwent gentrification a few years ago and now we are seeing it happen in areas like Thomastown and Lalor, as the ripple effect pushes buyers out further. Now we are seeing average brick veneer houses on average sized blocks of 600 sqm to 700 sqm of land selling for over $700,000. Read our comments in Scott Carbines article here. 

As prices continue to increase in the inner suburbs, we are now seeing some very strong demand in the outer suburbs which used to be Melbourne’s "poorer cousin" suburbs. These suburbs, in the past few decades, haven’t had the strongest growth because Melburnians have wanted to stay closer to the city and not wanted to live 20 to 40 kilometres out of the CBD. Now that affordability is a big factor, this is pushing people out to these more affordable suburbs and creating some very strong growth. Melbourne’s outer suburbs dominated the highest growth figures in the last twelve months and that is a big change from ten years ago when the inner suburbs dominated most of the statistics. Read our comments in Hayley Goddard's article here. 

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