WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN THE MARKET REBOUNDS

The growing signs that some of the social isolation restrictions are likely to be eased in the near future is good news for all of us. Of course, one of the questions that many Victorian homeowners will be asking is how quickly we might see a return to a more normal property market, and what to expect as the market rebounds from the current slowdown.

We don’t need to look too far back into history to see what lessons can be learned from past market rebounds. For example, when the most recent market correction began in the last quarter of 2018, the downturn reached its low point around March 2019 and had regained almost all of the price drop by the end of last year.

If you look back a little further, the impact of the global Financial Crisis was felt in the Australian market from the middle of 2007 to early 2009. However, the drop in property values during this period was nowhere near as bad as predicted, and Melbourne’s median property price ended up rising by around 20% in the three years after the GFC.

Even the “recession we had to have” had far less impact than most people realise. Data from Corelogic shows that Melbourne’s median property values dropped just 7% from April 1990 to September 1992. The fact that our median house price hit a low point of $125,000 during this period shows how strong the overall gain in values has been since that period!

There is one lesson that history has taught us, and that whilst property values tend to be slow to respond to a market slowdown, they tend to rebound more quickly when the market begins to recover.

Ian Williams-Vendor Advocate