As predicted, Melbourne property values are officially on the rise again in step with all other capital cities. Since the beginning of November, according to CoreLogic, Melbourne has outperformed Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide in price growth, and with clearance rates at just below 70%, they are only slightly behind Sydney.
As we noted a couple of months ago in a post, the market retraction in Melbourne is likely to provide more opportunity during the upswing for savvy buyers. The data tells us that the Melbourne market bottomed on Oct 18 and the Aussie market bottomed a week earlier, whereas we called the inflection point in late September. Another sign of data lag due to the gap between sale and settlement dates before all results are logged.
Overall, this means that the impact of the Covid pandemic on property values from peak to trough was a modest decline of:
- 1.7% – Aussie property
- 2.8% – Capital cities
As we’ve been commenting on since April, this is in line with our expectations of a less than 5% retraction. It is worth noting that Aussie property prices haven’t had net growth for 4 years. It is likely that we will not see a resumption of value growth at the rate of knots we saw prior to Covid hitting Australian shores.
