Melbourne Housing Market Update [video] | July 2021

Melbourne house values were up 1.5% in June, slightly below the combined capital city average if 1.9%.

You can also check out the local reports for Brisbane and Sydney.

However, the financial year growth rate at 7.7% was the lowest of any capital city and well below the combined capitals average of 13.5%.

House values have been rising at a faster pace than units, ending the financial year 8.9% higher compared with the 4.7% lift in unit values.

The softer performance across Melbourne over the year could only partly be attributed to the extebded lockdown which ended on October last year.

Housing values did fall through this period, but growth in housing values over the first six months of 2021, at 9.7% has also been below average.

The softest trajectory can probably be attributed to a variety of factors, including Melbourne’s larger exposure to stalled overseas migration and an outlaw of residents to other states and regional areas of the state.

Here’s what’s currently happening in Melbourne

The Melbourne property market has been one of the strongest and most consistent performers over the last four decades and despite having a lull last year thanks to Covid19, it is now forecast to perform strongly in 2021 with double digithouse price growth likely in the next 12 months.

Both buyers and sellers are now back in the Melbourne property market as consumer confidence has picked up strongly, resulting in a higher number of property transactions, auction clearance rates are strong and prices are rising, but Melbourne’s inner city apartment market still looks in bad shape.

FOMO (fear of missing out) is now prevalent in those interested in Melbourne real estate, but there is still plenty of growth left as Melbourne property values have only just reached their pre-pandemic levels and are about to create new peaks, meaning they will only now reach the previous 2017 peak levels.

Currently house price

While the initial surge in Melbourne property prices was broad based, with first homebuyers entering the market, established home buyers upgrading and the more expensive segment of Melbourne’s property market performing well, more recently the more expensive, affluent suburbs have been outperforming with regard to capital growth.

Houses in regional Victoria with easy access to the capital city continue to be in strong demand.

On the other hand, high-rise apartments in the many Melbourne CBD towers or close to universities are likely to underperform and keep decreasing in value.

Melbourne is the auction capital of Australia. After bearing the brunt of the impact of COVID-19 last year, auction clearance rates in Melbourne have been at boom time levels.

The Real Estate Institute of Victoria (REIV) reported that Melbourne recorded an overall auction clearance rate of 84.8 per cent from more than 3,000 auctions held in February 2021, beating out the decade-high clearance rate of 84.0 per cent recorded in 2010.

Over February 2021, across Victoria 17 suburbs (with a minimum of 10 auctions), saw a 100 per cent clearance rate including: Hawthorn East, Fitzroy North, Ferntree Gully, Rowville, Brunswick East, Sandringham, Seaford, Collingwood, Ashburton, Blackburn South, Fawkner, Wantirna, Boronia, Fairfield, Hillside, Seddon and St Kilda West.

Meanwhile, Reservoir recorded the highest number of auction sales: 44 out of 53 total listings.

This was followed by Coburg, which cleared 37 out of 38, and Bentleigh, which sold 35 out of 40 properties put to auction.

Other suburbs on the top-selling list are Brunswick (34), Preston (34), Glen Waverley (33), Mount Waverley (31), Craigieburn (30), Richmond (30) and Carnegie (29).

Melbourne’s top performers 2021

The Melbourne economy has undoubtedly been the most impacted by COVID-19 in Australia, both because of the second major outbreak in case numbers through the September quarter, and because international migration has been a key component of population growth across the state, and thus an important contributor to aggregate demand, and housing demand.

The charts below compare various economic indicators across Australia and Victoria.

State final demand fell -3.4% over the 2020 calendar year compared with a -1.1% decline in National GDP.

Employment levels are higher in Victoria compared with pre-COVID levels, more so than the whole of Australia, but the state suffered a larger contraction in employment through late 2020.

Housing values across the combined capital cities are now 7.4% above February 2020, and while Melbourne property values are at record highs, they have not made the same gains as other capital cities, sitting just 2.4% higher due to the more significant reduction in housing values through the extended lockdown period.

The chart below summarises sub-market performance of dwellings across SA4 regions of Victoria.

Each region has seen an increase in values in the 3 months to April, and all but two markets are higher in value over the year. Regional Victoria continued to show a significantly faster pace of growth in housing values relative to Melbourne over the past twelve months.

The lingering impact of COVID-19 is felt geographically in the inner city region of Melbourne, where closed international borders has a significant negative impact on demand for rental property in particular.

CoreLogic estimates that Inner Melbourne housing markets account for 45.9% of investment unit stock across the greater Melbourne metro