Victoria Real Estate Review, March 2018

The Melbourne housing market continues to outperform Sydney with annual growth of 6.9%. In comparison, Sydney values fell by 0.5% in the 12 months to the end of February, according to CoreLogic.

Randolph Clements, Managing Director of Raine & Horne Victoria, commented that some experts were focused on a recent statistic showing that the Melbourne market had fallen by 0.1% in February. “This is an infinitesimally small drop and is spread across the entire Melbourne market,” said Randolph. “It does not consider the many, many markets in Melbourne that are still enjoying decent capital growth.

“To illustrate, we sold a knockdown property in Mount Martha for over $900,000. Local agents didn’t expect it to sell for $750,000, but the final sale beat these expectations by $150,000.”

Underpinning the Melbourne market is the massive infrastructure investments in transport. This includes the Metro Rail Tunnel, a five-year project worth $11 billion and the $6.7 billion four-year Westgate Tunnel project. Randolph noted, “Since negotiating the ills of the “recession we had to have” in the 1990s, we’ve had 17 years of growth in Melbourne.

“Even if interest rates go up by 100 basis points, they’ll still be low in comparison to other times in our economic history. It won’t make much difference, and people will still want to buy quality, well-located property in Melbourne.”