HOW TO ASSESS WHERE THE PROPERTY MARKET IS HEADED

Whether you are selling a property or buying one, it is vital that you understand longterm and recent history of the real estate market, its current state and, finally, where it is headed in the near future. Understanding where the property market is headed can make a difference of thousands if not tens-of-thousands of dollars to your result as a vendor or buyer. Regardless of whether or not you are ready to buy or sell, if the market is not in your favour and you have the luxury of waiting it out, doing so can make all the difference. 

Methods for assessing the property market

Auction results

Auction results are a regular way to track the performance of your local market. You can do this by heading to our Sales and Auctions results page to view the previous week’s macro results as well as using the search tool to find sales and auctions results for individual suburbs.

Finally, click on ‘Edit auction alert’ below the search bar to sign up to weekly sales and auctions updates for your chosen markets. On your email account, set a filter for these emails to be sent automatically to a folder in your account designated for these updates. This means that you can have them all in the spot and at any time scroll through these emails to get an immediate birdseye view of how the market has performed over the longterm.

Cash Rate

Whether the Reserve Bank of Australia increases the cash rate or lowers the cash rate, either result will have direct impacts on the real estate market and your own financial goals.

The RBA uses the cash rate as a lever to influence the economy as a whole and in turn the real estate market. Lower cash rates are intended to encourage consumers to spend money and help money circulate, much like blood through an artery. If people feel reticent to spend their money and instead save their disposable cash, this can risk slowing down the flow of cash across the economy, which can see growth in the economy slow down. Lowering a cash rate often has the result of lower interest rates on home loans, which can mean that more potential buyers enter the market, increasing demand for properties and driving growth in the real estate market as a result.

Keeping a regular eye on the RBA cash rate and projections of where it is headed may inform your decisions in the near future when it comes to buying or selling a property.

Property prices

An easy way to help stay up-to-date with where the market is headed is to research an address with our Property Price Estimate tool. Located on the navigation bar on the realestateview.com.au homepage, the Price Estimate tool allows you to search for any address in Australia and receive current market and demographic data for that property.

On top of market data for that property, you can use this tool to inform your knowledge of the market but scrolling down to view such information as median earnings for that particular pocket within a suburb, demographic information (age, household) and sales data for that suburb for both freestanding houses and units/apartments. Being able to view both property types will give you added insight into how the local market is performing, with changes to unit sales prices potentially indicating larger shifts in the larger market.

Media

The media is a major source for information to inform your knowledge of where the market is headed in the near and longterm future. This doesn’t just mean the news. News media can be most helpful when assessing the short-term future of the market, but can be less reliable for longterm projections. Look towards long-form projections through books, white papers and studies by academic institutions and thinktanks. These should all incorporate awareness and understanding of both national and international trends to highlight where the market has been and how previous patterns of performance in the market and their telltale signs in the past may be used to read the direction of the market.

Industry updates 

There are some valuable industry tools that you can utilise as a consumer. CoreLogic provides monthly updates for the national, regional and city markets and should be one of your core sources for information that you can use in sync with auction updates and micro-market data. 

A good way to keep track of your understanding of the media is to create a simple spreadsheet, splitting up your resources for information (i.e. media, subscriptions, newsletters, auctions results) and logging these in your spreadsheet as you encounter them. This means you will be able to easily go over your spreadsheet and rely less on the individual voices that can quickly become a cacophony of sound and instead start to identify patterns in your own observations of these various resources.

Source - https://www.realestateview.com.au/blog/2020/01/assess-property-market-headed/