Weekly Market Update - 2nd December 2018
By | 2nd Dec 18

Summer is officially here and this is what you should look out for these holidays.

Melbourne continues to offer more opportunities to buyers with a 49% clearance rate from a Super Saturday of auctions with 921 reported auctions.  Properties with a “WOW” factor are still achieving solid results with strong competition.  We saw this with a family home on 2.6 acres in Yarrambat where we had to push hard against two other bidders and in the end, we were able to purchase the property $140,000 above reserve as it was a mortgagee sale.  Properties with good qualities and a “WOW” factor like this one with great views outperform the rest of the market place. 

The one to two million dollar bracket was quite patchy overall apart from this result where we saw properties passing in St Kilda, Caulfield and Fitzroy, many of them on a vendor bid without any bidding at all.  This is a sign of the market and the times because a year ago, many of those properties would have sold well above reserve and would have had competitive bidding from at least three or four buyers.  

The new apartment market is patchy and many properties are not being able to be valued at the right value that have been bought “off the plan”.  Three out of ten new apartment sales have valuations come in lower in price than when they have signed the original contract.  This is a worry for buyers because they will need to top up the loans and put in more cash to make up the loans or otherwise they will lose their hard owned deposits.

The outer suburbs of Melbourne continue to drive the market and see much stronger growth than the inner suburbs. In the last year, 54 of the 57 top performing Melbourne suburbs were in the outer areas.  Most of the suburbs were over 20km

from Melbourne’s CBD.  This is a big change in Melbourne’s market, where the inner suburbs tended to be the golden spots and blue chip areas which always had the strongest growth.  The outer suburbs were lagging behind and now are having stronger growth across the board.

 

Watch: Frank Valentic's first market update for December