WHITSUNDAY E-NEWS REAL ESTATE: 1st week of Feb. 2022

Hi, Annette Neil from PRD Whitsunday.

This week I wanted to discuss the latest CoreLogic report that has come out regarding what happened in the housing market nationally during January.

We saw house values go up by 1.1% in January across the entire nation, and that's an increase from December, which was at one per cent.

So remembering that it is traditionally quite slower in January in the volume of sales.

It's a little bit hard to predict what the trends will be this year. At this stage, we'll have to wait and see what happens over the entire quarter to see really what the outlook is looking like again. The RBA met this week, and they kept interest rates on hold, however they have made some indications that later in the year, given the rate of inflation, they will look to increase interest rates.
We're starting to see some fixed-term pricing on mortgages creep up, and that is having a little bit of a push down on the affordability for people to purchase.  
It's interesting to see what happens now that Brisbane and Adelaide led the capital cities in January.
They were significantly higher than the national average figures, up around 1.8 there.

It's undoubtedly a trend that people are looking outside of the traditional capitals of Sydney and Melbourne and are now looking at the regional areas, which is us. People are looking through lockdowns at all of the issues in the big cities, particularly Melbourne, to get out and look to have a bit of a tree/sea change.
The region's housing prices increased by 1.8 over January so again no surprises everyone wants to come and live in Queensland.
We also saw the housing values here in Queensland go up by 2% in January, outperforming Adelaide or Regional south Australia.

People are looking to get out into a bit more wide-open space. Perhaps now the listings advertised in January are not the volume coming in, but the volume on the market was 20% lower than January last year.

It's interesting to see that there's undoubtedly a tightening that has happened over the last 12 months, which of course, makes it more of a seller's market than a buyer's market. Interestingly we saw the actual sales volume up 15% from January last year.

It's not quite in line with that 20%.

Perhaps, a few more people are holding back at the moment to see what's going to happen with the economy. It's a lot of info for you this week, but I hope that's given you a bit of an update on what's going on, and we'll see you next week.