Get ready for a bumper selling season in Melbourne!
Restrictions on the home inspections for sales have finally been allowed and we will see pent-up demand for property be unleashed across the city.
Owners who are keen to sell now should now finish preparing their properties for inspection because the spring selling season will seize the city very shortly.
The new rules state that a family can enter a property for a 15-minute inspection. They can travel beyond the 5km restriction if they intend to inspect a property for purchase or rent. The round-trip must be two hours or less. Unfortunately, we’re not able to go to regional Victoria yet.
If the lockdown has given you the yearning for a new home, then this is the ideal time to get into the market. As your local real estate agent, I am confident we will start to see a wave of sellers and buyers in just a matter of days.
With the market untested, there’ll be some great deals for the discerning buyer while sellers can take advantage of buyers’ post-lockdown optimism.
During the lockdown, the auction market almost disappeared. Industry researcher CoreLogic counted just 49 auctions for a recent weekend in Melbourne and fewer than 20 in the weeks prior. This compared to 630 auctions in Sydney on the same weekend.
Sydney auctions fell through the floor during its lockdown but they bounced back within a few weeks of restrictions being eased and we can take comfort from this example. Sellers who’d pulled their properties fear of crashing prices – a fear that never eventuated – quickly returned.
I believe Melbourne will experience a similar rebound and our spring selling season is sure to extend into November and beyond.
Here’s why; in the lead-up to our first lockdown, our market was in positive territory, growing 1.4% in the 12 weeks ending April 30. This result gave us an annual year-on-year increase in property value of 12.4%.
The city’s annual result outstripped the national average (8.3%) and would have been even better if values from the high-end of the market had not fallen 0.8% in the April quarter as economic and social concerns took hold.
Regional Victoria values also stayed in positive territory for the year ending April 30, rising 3.7% compared with the corresponding period in 2019. Its quarterly result was also good news for owners and investors, rising 2.4% in the 12 weeks to April 30.
So, after enduring this dreadful lockdown, I sincerely hope we can look forward to our lives finding some form of normality in the very near future. The re-emergence of the property market as an economic force for Victoria will be an added bounce for us all.