Weekly Property Market update - August 13, 2018
By | 13th Aug 18

Your weekly Property update by award winning Buyer’s Agent Frank Valentic

Melbourne’s property market continues its consistent results with a 64% clearance rate from 545 auctions and the entry level end of the market continues to be the strongest segment. We saw this with a two bedroom unit in St Vigeons Road, Reservoir where we unfortunately missed out for our buyer. The Auction was dominated by three first home buyers and the property finally sold for $522,500.

The apartment market is making a comeback as St Vigeons Road increased in value by over $100,000 in the last three years as it sold in March 2015 for $415,000 and previously it only had $55,000 growth in a six-year period, showing that the apartment/unit market is starting to get more momentum. We are seeing first home buyers driving that segment of the market since the stamp duty concessions came in last year in July.  It will be interesting to see though whether the first home buyer stamp duty concession is maintained by both governments as we have a state election in November this year. If this is cut, I predict we will see this impact the lower end of the market as first home buyers are dominating in the sub $750,000 mark, where the stamp duty concessions are available up too.

There has been a real slow down in the $1-2 million segment in the market in the last couple of months and we saw that again at auctions over the weekend, where most of the auctions only had one bidder or were passed in on a vendor bid. Foreign buyer numbers are down now and I think this has definitely had an impact in the eastern/south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne.  Foreign buyers are now only 9.6% and they were previously double at 17% in 2014. This has definitely had an impact on the upper end of the property market as we saw a house in Mont Albert North on the weekend in Dunloe Avenue passed in with no bids and it was on a substantial allotment of 1,110 sqm. This would have had strong interest from foreign buyers prior to the increase in stamp duty and taxes and the difficulty in obtaining finance now and getting funds out of their countries. 

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