Weekly Market Update 29th August 2017
By | 29th Aug 17

Weekly property insights by Frank Valentic

WATCH: Finance tips from Mario Borg. Mario will be joining us as a guest speaker at our September Investor Club next week. 

Melbourne’s property market continued its solid performance with a 77% clearance rate from a larger volume of 818 auctions. There were again some run-away results with the biggest auction result we saw in Port Melbourne where an old commission bank home sold for $1,642,000, $392,000 over reserve with six young families fighting it out. There was another record for land per square metre in Richmond, where a house in James Street on only 332 square metres of land sold for $2.7 million equating to $8,132 per square metre. We have a happy client who bought last week for only $6100 per square metre.

There has been a large decrease in the number of owner occupied dwellings over the last decade unfortunately as more buyers have been priced out of buying their own property to live in and have had to rent. Though there is also the emergence of the “rent investor” who have continued to rent and bought an investment property instead. There is less financial commitment when buying an investment property than when buying an owner-occupied property as the tenants contribute to the mortgage by paying rent. Read our comments in Scott Carbine’s article.

“Off the plan” buying can be a dangerous strategy for many buyers. In the last week an article in The Age highlighted a young couple who purchased a property and three years later the developer chose to exercise the sunset clause. He terminated the contract and resold it for a much higher profit than previously. “Off the plan” buying can be a very risky strategy and this young couple have now missed three years of a rising market where the property market in Melbourne in many instances has gone up 50%. Buyers should be very careful when buying off the plan due to this sunset clause and many other clauses.

Please don’t hesitate to check out our information about our popular Buyer’s Advocate, Sellers Advocate, Owner’s Corporation and Property Management services and our upcoming investor club night with a panel of experts talking all things "Development" on September 7th, as well as our future group block opportunity in Dandenong.