Monthly Market Update: April 2019
By | 16th Apr 19

Your monthly update from Frank Valentic

Melbourne’s property market has improved over the last month as the clearance rates are reaching around the 55% mark. This is up from the 45-50% we were seeing late last year. Though the days on market had increased drastically compared to a year ago, increasing from 30 to 60 days as it is taking much longer now for owners to sell their property. There have been some more solid results with more properties beating their reserves compared to last year and there are some more run away results. We saw this with a house in St Columbs Street, Hawthorn which sold for $460,000 or 25% over reserve with 70 bids. We would not have seen this sort of result last year.
 

Savvy buyers are looking beyond their dream suburbs and moving into the ripple suburbs that are neighbouring the suburbs that they’ve preferred. So many of these savvy buyers are looking in suburbs such as Mordialloc, Edithvale and Frankston as well as Coburg and Reservoir instead of the more popular inner blue chip suburbs that they might not be able to afford.

 

It will be interesting to see whether there are major changes within the mortgage broking industry and trailing commissions. Recent commentary says that the Federal government may have done a backflip on plans to ban trailing commissions for mortgage brokers. It will be interesting to see how this all will play out as mortgage brokers now account favour for over 50% of the mortgage industry.

 

More than 70% of Investors will shy away from purchasing a second hand property as they can no longer claim negative gearing according to a new survey. Results show that there is almost no need to change the country’s negative gearing policy and so it will be interesting to see how it pans out if Labor are elected.

 

Buyers need to stick to their budgets and not get carried away at auctions. We missed out for an investor at The Block auctions late last year as we stuck to our budgets and didn’t over pay. We were delighted for our investor client as he just bought The Block challenge apartment for under $2.7 million which is well below what all the other Block properties sold for.