arrod McCabe, director, Wakelin Property Advisory:
– Hi, everyone. Well, welcome to Melbourne’s lockdown 2.0. Certainly by looking at the numbers over the weekend, the auction market’s certainly been impacted. Around 100 properties that were intended to go to auction over Saturday and Sunday, the weekend just passed, had been withdrawn from the market. Now they’ll either go to a private sale or an Expression of Interest, or perhaps even be withdrawn all together. In terms of those that did proceed under an online basis, the clearance rate dropped to below 50%. It certainly shows that there’s a little bit of concern there, and to a degree, it’s uncertainty, which is what we saw during the first lockdown stages.
It’s disappointing. July market was shaping up to be quite good. There was certainly a lot of positivity around and certainly some enthusiasm and seeing some pretty good results. From a vendors perspective, the uncertainty comes from a number of fronts, but partially it’s to do with how are buyers going to be able to see my property? Is my marketing going to be worthwhile, or am I marketing to a non-existent buyer market? And are buyers going to be able to inspect my property and feel comfortable with the process? Agents are certainly battling away and doing the best that they can. They’re certainly becoming more and more familiar with the different technology that’s available, and we’re finding, from a buying perspective, that the different online auction portals are a very user-friendly and work really, really well, particularly for those agents that are very familiar with the processes and have done a lot of homework and due diligence and preparation for these. So they can be quite smooth and work through really well, which is great.
From a buyer’s perspective, we’re likely to probably see, as we did during April and May during the first lockdown period, that there was a lot more property that sold off market. So it’ll be very important to keep fairly close to the agents that you’re dealing with and those that have got a good market share in the suburbs that you’re searching in. Also bear in mind though that a lot of vendors, given that there is, to a degree, a set period this time, now, that may obviously be extended, depending upon how these lockdown controls go, but because there is that six week timeframe, if everything does go to plan, a lot of vendors are probably holding off to then, if they’re able to give themselves a proper campaign come the back end of August and into September. So there may well be a bit of a hibernation period over the next five to six weeks, but keeping close with your agents and there should still be buying opportunities to be had. Take care of each other and I look forward to speaking soon. Thank you.
