The Southeast Queensland Property Market Continues to Perform Strongly 

 Weekly Real Estate Market Update with Leigh Martinuzzi MPG

From late December until late January, the real estate market is typically a sleepy time of the year, with little activity generally taking place. We usually find things start to pick up after Australia day and more so as we head into February. This year is slightly different! The main reason is that we have many more buyers in the market searching for a property to buy, with demand at record highs across the country. In most markets across Australia, we’ve also seen a higher than usual jump in new listings hit the market as homeowners take advantage of the strong selling conditions.

According to early reports by CoreLogic, Southeast Queensland has seen a surge in new listings with Brisbane reporting new listings up on this time last year by 43.8%. Overall property availability in many markets is down on the five-year average, including Brisbane which is down 29%. Even with the increased amount of property on the market for sale buyer demand is still too strong to keep up. Michael Yardney reports that for every property that comes to the market 1.4 are being sold. In general, this means that the time to sell is still short and that minimum vendor is discounting required to close a deal. In Queensland and locally, we’ve seen a slight increase in the median day’s properties are on the market for sale (see chart below).

Dwelling values are still noticing slight gains week on week with a weekly change in values across the capital cities of 0.3%. This is not as hot as we experienced in 2021 however, the property market hasn’t yet kicked into gear for 2021. The next few weeks will be a good indication of how property markets will perform in 2022. Auction clearance rates are down yet again, to be expected at this time of year. 

The Sunshine Coast is still experiencing high demand for properties of all types and the common feedback from the active buyers we are dealing with daily is that there simply aren’t enough properties to choose from. They’ve also highlighted that they feel some of the new asking prices are becoming a bit high, this may explain why the time on the market is slightly higher. The charts below highlight that across the board for sale searches, email enquiries, and the average views per listings lowered as we’ve entered 2022. 

The next few weeks will provide us with more information to help us better understand the outlook for 2022. The uncertainty in the market at the moment is being challenged by the current COVID outbreaks which are causing many to isolate or stay indoors. This may delay the official start of the selling season in 2022. 

Auction Results State by State (Preliminary). Week ending Sun 9th of Jan 2022.

• Queensland – =80% (10/768)
• NSW – 50% (4/292)
• Victoria – 100% (2/638)
• ACT – 50% (2/3)
• South Australia – NA (1/222)
• Tasmania – NA (0/103)
• Western Australia – NA (1/585)
• Northern Territory – NA (0/19)

*(Auctions/Private Sales)

Review of the Week

“Leigh was excellent to deal with very easy to approach

Leigh’s approach to marketing our place was second to none from when we met at the house to start negations until the house was sold. I have no hesitations in recommending Leigh and Kezeah to anybody, their knowledge of the area was suburb.”– Palmwoods Seller