6th January 2020: ‘The Weirdest Market I’ve Seen’: Melbourne’s East in 2019

Melbourne's property market emerged from 2019 in a strong position.

Written by Jack Boronovskis for realestate.com.au on 28 December 2019

It was a tale of two halves for the property market in Melbourne's east for 2019, with sluggish market activity giving way to renewed vigour in the back half of the year, experts say.

May's federal election, an easing of lending criteria and record-low interest rates were all raised as key factors in the end-of-year surge.

Median house prices in Monash jumped 9 per cent over three months until the end of November, according to realestate.com.au.

Over the same period, Whitehorse, Manningham and Maroondah all recorded price increases between 7 and 10 per cent.

But each council area is still down between 7 and 9 per cent for the past 12 months, according to the realestate.com.au data.

Fletchers Mooroolbark Director Daniel Bolton said the past year had been "the weirdest market I've seen".

Fletchers Mooroolbark Director Daniel Bolton

"The first six months it was doom and gloom and the prices were dropping rapidly, and it was tough going to get deals down, and the second half of the year it's kind of flipped on its head," he said.

"Three or four months ago it was just red hot."

Mr Bolton said a changed mindset in the banking sector, a shock election result in May and low interest rates had stimulated the market.

Buxton Box Hill director Jim Chen said many buyers had held off over 2018 and saw houses surge out of their price ranges.

He said there had also been a return of overseas buyers.

Barry Plant Doncaster East agent Todd Lucas said open-for-inspection numbers had tripled from the first five months of the year until now.

"More and more families are coming back, more people have approved finance and they're not so worried about the banks," Mr Lucas said.

"People were worried the market's going down, now there's buyers trying to get into the marketplace before it goes up again."

"There's certainly more urgency from buyers – in Manningham we have found that municipalities become one suburb. We could open up a house in Templestowe at 11 in the morning and then open one in Doncaster East in the afternoon and we'd see the same families."

Mr Lucas said buyers were starting to place early offers to avoid the competition of an auction.

"A lot of properties that are going to auction, the majority of them could sell before," he said.

It was a stop-start kind of year. Picture: Valeriu Campan

Visit the REA website with the article here: 'The Weirdest Market I've Seen': Melbourne's East in 2019