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Mixed messages
There is no clear consensus on the state of Melbourne property market right now. Ask 10 people how the market is, and you’ll receive 10 different answers, ranging from ‘about to crash’ to ‘about to take off’, and everything in between. From my perspective, the market seems great right now! I had two auctions in…
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Stonnington Trends
We had our busiest Q1 ever for Team Fetter/Sciola, selling 32 properties in February and March alone. And then April hit and the market went ghostly quiet with Easter and school holidays, to the extent that we haven’t been sending out our weekly new listings email due to a lack of new listings. Fortunately, dear…
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What drives online engagement?
Advertising a property for sale these days is not cheap. Realestate.com.au is the dominant player in Melbourne, followed by Domain. To advertise a house in Stonnington today on these two portals alone costs nearly $7,000 for their best available digital packages. For this you can expect roughly 3,000 – 6,000 listing views on REA and 2,000 -…
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Bidding strategy
Melbourne is the auction capital of Australia, if not the world. No other city has such a strong bias towards auction as the preferred method for selling real estate. If you are a homeowner in Melbourne, the chances are that you have participated in auctions before, either as a buyer, seller, or observer. Auction is…
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Eight out of ten
It’s been a productive week for Team Fetter/Sciola with five sales in the last five days and five auctions coming up this week, including a twilight auction tonight at 10 Grace Street, Malvern. We’ve had 10 auctions so far this year. Three sold before auction, four sold under the hammer with multiple bidders, one passed…
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Your dream home
For the first time since early 2022, buyers are telling us that they’ve finally got choice. It’s not unusual for some buyers to be inspecting seven or eight properties on a Saturday. When buyers feel like they have choice, they also tend to feel like they have more time, or less urgency. If I wait…
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Melbourne lagging
According to PropTrack, Melbourne home values have only increased by 15 percent since Covid (March 2020). Over the same period, Sydney has risen by 30 percent, Perth by 46 percent, Brisbane by 56 percent and Adelaide by 60 percent. In other words, Melbourne has seen half the growth of Sydney, a third of the growth of…
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Timing the market
If you bought and held a single fronted worker’s cottage in Prahran in 1975, it has roughly increased in value one hundred-fold (100X). $17,000 in 1975… $1,700,000 in 2024. If you bought the same house in the ‘peak’ markets of 2017 or 2021, it is pretty much worth what you paid for it. In fact,…
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No perfect time
Saturday saw our first round of open inspections for 2024 and, for a long weekend, it was busy. We saw between 30 and 40 groups of buyers at some inspections. Strong numbers by any standard. We always tend to see a bump in inspection numbers and online views in the first few weeks of a…
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The intangibles
Carla and I are thrilled to be back at work after (a little too much) quality time with our young kids. We are very excited about 2024, coming off the back of our second strongest six months in real estate ever – topped only by H2 2021, also known as the craziest real estate market…
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Spring Recap
Spring 2023 is done and dusted. In 33 days, it will be 2024. Friday is the first day of summer. It’s hard to fathom… especially given the drab weather this week. From a real estate market perspective, spring 2023 was a very solid and productive one. It was far better than spring 2022 in terms…
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Exodus
Have you ever noticed how there aren’t any sales in a street for several years, and then suddenly there are a string of sales in short succession? “Why is everyone selling?”, is the typical response from buyers when they notice successive or concurrent sales in the same street. Very rarely is there a sinister reason…
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The final furlong
The race that stops the nation put a pause on auctions over the long weekend, but it didn’t prevent buyers from inspecting our open homes in strong numbers. We were surprised to see over 20 groups, even 30 groups attend some of our new listings on Saturday, suggesting that there are still plenty of buyers…
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Subjective
The property market is subjective. There are objective measures of the market, such as the clearance rate or auction volume. Yet each buyer, seller, agent, owner or renter will have a completely different view of the market at any given time based on their own experience. A prospective tenant right now will tell you how…
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Neighbours
As agents we love neighbours! Neighbours are great! They pad out the numbers at our inspections. They usually speak highly of the property and the street in front of the genuine buyers. They come and show their support on auction day. Neighbours also become sellers, eventually. A large proportion of our database comes from meeting…
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Deep pockets
I called a highly competitive auction on Saturday with 316 bids. There were four bidders, with the final two bidding mostly in $1,000 increments for the last quarter of a million dollars. Both were downsizers and both were highly motivated to secure this single level, north facing home with a double garage (tick, tick, tick for…
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A new peak
Australian house prices are about to hit a new record high, according to CoreLogic data as reported by the ABC. House prices nationally are just one percent below the previous high in April 2022, and are growing steadily across the country with Melbourne up 4.3 percent since January. Sydney is up 10.6 percent since bottoming…
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Super Saturday
Well, it was a super Saturday for Collingwood supporters but a very quiet Saturday for auctioneers, with only three auctions scheduled across Jellis Craig’s 33 office network. With the grand final done and dusted and Cup Weekend looming, this leaves a clear run of four unencumbered weekends to market a property, culminating in ‘Super Saturday’…
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David Sciola 