April 2022

With auction clearance rates dropping most weeks, more stock is on the market which in turn gives buyers more choice, we are officially in a buyer’s market. Property investor activity has grown 67.8% year on year. Property investors took out $33.7 billion of home loans in January, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, marking the second consecutive month in which investors set a borrowing record. Australia’s vacancy rate (the share of untenanted rental properties) is at an incredibly low 1.1%, according to the latest data from Domain. That means most property investors are finding it easy to secure quality tenants.

I read an interesting article by John McGrath about how profoundly Australia has been impacted by the pandemic, with the highest regional population growth in 40 years. This of course was largely due to people moving from cities to coastal and country locations due to the impacts ofcovid-19 lock downs and the ability to work from home driving people to consider lifestyle choices and space over more densely populated city regions. This led to a decline in capital city population growth for the first time ever. This had a knock-on effect to a rise in home values in many regional towns; amongst the many – Cobar a mining town saw values rise 61.4%, Byron Bay 39% Ballina 40% and Cessnock 35.9%

Another interesting trend has seen the gap widen between the value of houses and units. Buying a typical house will now cost you almost 30% more than buying the typical unit.

CoreLogic has reported that, at the end of February, Australia’s median house price was 29.8% higher than its median unit price – a record gap.

Join me in congratulating both Cortney Bowen & Kelly Inn in receiving this month’s HighSpec Star Award. They have both embodied one of our core values ‘Collaboration is the key to success’ by combining their knowledge and time to supporting each other and collaborating on a client’s property search they were able to not only help our clients chose the right agent to sell their property but most importantly help them buy their dream home in just 2 weeks!