Weekly Market Update - February 11th, 2019
By | 10th Feb 19

What's happening with the investor market.

Melbourne’s property market had another very quiet weekend following on from the previous weekend and the start of the auction season.  There was a 52% clearance rate from a very small volume of 236 auctions.  This is not anywhere near the amount of properties that we are now going to see in the coming weekends with volumes increasing over the next two weekends.  

The strongest segment of the market continues to be the First Home Buyer end and we saw that with another solid result in Epping.  A house in Jeffrey Court sold for $722,000 with strong competition between an investor and First Home Buyer and the reserve of $720,000 was just passed.  This end of the market continues to have strong interest from First Home Buyers due to the stamp duty concessions they receive. 

There are big changes following the Royal Commission findings as part of this, mortgage brokers are set to lose trail commissions and will transition to a consumer pays business model from July 1st 2020. Trail commissions will be banned on all new loans and this is a massive change, given that 60% of residential home loans in Australia are now written by mortgage brokers.

There are better buying opportunities in the Melbourne property market place now as Melbourne’s median house price has dropped in many suburbs. There used to be 143 million dollar suburbs in Melbourne and now there are 128-a drop of 16 suburbs or 10.49 per cent. Flemington, Lower Plenty, Collingwood and Chadstone have now presented more opportunities for buyers under $1 million dollars.