Sydney property still strong, Melbourne takes breather for grand final

Editorial director of Switzer
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The property market, as measured by the auction clearance rate, continues to chug along on the East Coast of Australia, with clearance rates of 81.5% in Sydney and 75.8% in Melbourne (see table 1 below). But Melbourne’s number is coming off a very, very low number of properties listed – largely due to it being AFL grand final weekend.

This week Paul Rickard explains why there’s no property bubble, and these strong clearance rates are just evidence of activity returning to a market that has been in the doldrums for some time.

The revised data for last week shows that Sydney is maintaining a clearance rate of just over 80% and Melbourne is gradually edging up into the mid to late 70% bracket (see table 2 below).

And the same data a year ago shows that it was also grand final weekend in Victoria, with just 34 properties listed in Melbourne, compared to 324 in Sydney, which means the Melbourne clearance rate of 76.9% should not be given much attention. Sydney’s rate was still in the early 60s at 60.1% (See table 3 below).

The most expensive property sold in Sydney was a three-bedroom unit in the exclusive North Shore suburb of Kirribilli, which went for $4.7 million. And Melbourne still managed the sale of a $1 million property despite grand final activity, although the most expensive properties in Adelaide and Brisbane went for much more (see table 4 below).

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