Weekly Market Update - 1st November 2017
By | 31st Oct 17

The Melbourne market had its biggest ever weekend with a volume of over 2000 auctions which is the biggest auction weekend in history. This was largely because vendors were trying to get an uninterrupted four week campaign after the AFL grand final and before the start of the Spring Racing Carnival. With a huge supply of properties, Melbourne passed this super Saturday test with flying colours with a 73% clearance rate, though there are some more opportunities and there will continue to be opportunities in the next eight weeks of auctions before the Christmas holiday break when everything shuts down for a few months and before the market resumes around mid February. Buyers need to get their skates on because there are really only eight weeks to shop around and try to buy a property.  

The Block auctions dominated the News headlines after the weekend’s Grand Finale and we were excited once again to be chosen to represent two young upsizing families and one investor client and we bid on all five properties. It is always disappointing to miss out for a client, so we were disappointed we did not secure a house for our young upsizing McKinnon family with teenage kids and also missed out for our professional middle aged investor client from Toorak. We were however delighted to buy the best value for money house buying Clint and Hannah’s house at the last auction for the lowest price of $2,615,000, which was a $457,000 saving from what comedian Dave Hughes paid for Josh and Elyse’s winning property. That property was on smaller land and had similar accommodation and internal size so our client was delighted they could put a little bit of money into this property and make it their own and save hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to Josh and Elyse’s and Jason and Sarah’s prices.

 It was exciting again buying our eighth property on The Block and we have now bid on thirty of the thirty-nine Block properties, hence why they call me “The Block” Buyer’s Advocate Veteran! We have now bid on behalf of eighteen investors and twelve home buyers but the real focus this season was home buyers as we bid on four of the properties for home buyers and only one for an investor. In six previous series of The Block where there have been apartments, these have mostly been investor focused properties due to the returns and the depreciation offered.

I have been proud and humbled by many of the kind words and comments that have come our way after the auctions and I am so proud to see how far my Buyer’s Advocate profession has come in the last five years and how far it has come in the last seventeen years since I started our Buyer’s Advocate company. We now have eighteen staff and to see all the successful buyers represented by Buyer’s Advocates at the auctions shows how far our industry has come. There were only two other bidders that were not Buyer’s Advocates and one was a licensed Real Estate.

We really appreciate the positive comments and hope that we have made a difference and contributed to the growing profile of Buyer’s Advocates. When I first bid at The Block auctions in Cameron Street Richmond, I was the only Buyer’s Advocate representing buyers and that has changed now significantly as we saw at The Block auctions on the weekend. We still manage the Richmond property for our investor client and those poor contestants only won a total combined profit of $225,00 as it was a bit of a disaster where all the properties passed in apart from Polly and Waz’s property, that I purchased for an investor. It was well below the $1,220,000 profit these contestants made. Some of them were not so happy with their winnings as they were definitely a lot less than the contestants who won more than double in the last Port Melbourne series with total winnings of $2,835,000.

Please don’t hesitate to check out our website for more information about our popular Buyer’s Advocate, Sellers Advocate, Owner’s Corporation and Property Management services and our latest newsletters as well as our future Group Block opportunities. Our newest opportunities are a block of five 2 bedroom villa units in St Albans, each with a car space (approximately $320,000 each) and a block of four 1 bedroom and two 2 bedroom villa units in Ballarat, each with a car space (approximately $150,000 each for the 1 bedroom units and approximately $200,000 each for the 2 bedroom units).