Passed in at auction – playing the game

Posted on Friday, April 13 2012 at 1:28 PM

With data showing the number of auction listings has increased significantly in recent peak periods, one expert is warning buyers to keep a cool head.

Real Estate Buyers’ Agents Association of
Australia (REBAA) president Warwick Brookes said buyers who were the highest
bidders for a property passed in at auction should know how to “play the game”.

“Just because a property has been passed in
does not mean that this is market price – it’s simply a price point for further
negotiation,” Brookes said.

His tips for negotiation at auction are:

Stay
outside the property

Unless it’s pouring rain, don’t follow the
agent inside. Position yourself outside where you can assess your competition.

Determine
the reserve

Most times, the reserve is not the price at
which the vendor will ultimately sign a contract. What’s the lowest price the
vendor will sell for?

Decide
on your strategy

Do your research and estimate what the
property is worth under low competition and at the upper end, where there’s
intense competition.

Deliberate
and minimise the outcome

The extent of any negotiations will depend
on how much the property is passed in for. Don’t be frightened to drive a hard
bargain. If there are no other buyers in sight and everybody has left, reassess
how much you’re willing to counter-offer.

Keep
a poker face

It’s a fact that 90 per cent of all
communication is conveyed through eye contact and body language. Keep a poker
face – it can save you thousands.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/API_Property_News/~3/wyDmyRdkPGw/passed-in-at-auction-playing-the-game

War on real estate red tape in Queensland

Posted on Wednesday, April 11 2012 at 9:28 AM

The new Queensland Government will work to cut real estate red tape as a matter of priority, it was announced yesterday.

Premier Campbell Newman held the first meeting of his Cabinet in Brisbane on Tuesday, where the state’s property industry was a topic of discussion.

As part of sweeping changes, homebuyers will once again be eligible for a stamp duty concession of up to $7000, Newman said.

The principal place of residence stamp duty concession, abolished as part of the 2011-12 State Budget, will be reinstated from July 1.

The government also flagged streamlining home sale contracts and confirmed it will introduce legislation to scrap sustainability declaration forms.

The mandatory forms were introduced in 2010 as a way of combating climate change by detailing a property’s green credentials at the point of sale, but the move has been heavily criticised by the real estate industry.

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Darwin’s laneway housing prank hits national headlines

Posted on Thursday, April 05 2012 at 8:57 AM

A prank NT News article about proposed infill housing in Darwin laneways has hit national news headlines as legitimate news, despite the newspaper admitting to the April Fools’ Day prank on Monday this week.

Syndicated news can be risky business, particularly in a large network like News Limited. This week was a perfect example of how even prank news in the News Limited-owned NT News can infiltrate through the corporation’s national news network and be reported on by other publications as legitimate news, minus the clearly mentioned day-after April Fools’ Day joke acknowledgement as done so in the Darwin regional daily.

On April Fools’ Day last Sunday the NT News reported that the Northern Territory’s Planning Minister announced that Darwin’s laneways would be infilled with ridiculously narrow housing to eliminate anti-social behaviour in these laneways and to boost affordable housing.

In a second article in the same April Fools’ Day issue the newspaper also reported that major liquefied natural gas giant Inpex had struck a deal with the NT Government to construct a tunnel from Darwin to Mandorah.

While both were practical jokes, the laneway article was syndicated to news.com.au and no mention was made in the online news source of the news being a practical joke; readers were only informed of the joke if they clicked through a link to the NT News article, then clicked through a second link outlining more details of the proposal.

LJ Hooker Darwin’s Robert Higgins said that jokes aside, the anti-social behaviour in Darwin’s laneways “hits the paper frequently” as an issue. “So does the lack of affordable housing, so put the two issues together and that’s the solution that was reported on April Fools’ Day.”

Higgins said laneways were designed throughout Darwin suburbs as pedestrian links between shopping centres and parks, “so people could walk from one suburban space to another”.

“However while intended to have a useful purpose what these laneways have attracted is some bad behaviour,” he said.

“Some laneways have been locked off permanently with gates at either end, others are locked only at nights, others remain open with no problems.”

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More affordable housing for Karratha

Posted on Thursday, April 05 2012 at 3:30 PM

Karratha will eventually see more than 1200 new lots released at Nickol and Madigan Road, with 369 dwellings on 24 hectares of land under way, according to the Western Australian Minister for Regional Development Brendon Grylls.

Achieving affordable housing and attracting more developers to Karratha is the goal with 220 lots sized around 550 square metres for houses as well as 89 grouped dwellings and a site which can be developed for up to 60 apartments, said Grylls.

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Dumping first homebuyer grant on new homes would mean more job losses

Posted on Thursday, April 05 2012 at 12:30 PM

First homebuyer grants should be restricted to the purchase of new homes to stimulate construction jobs rather than dumping the $19,500 incentive across the board, according to the Victorian branch of the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA).

The Real Estate Institute of Victoria’s call to dump the First Home Buyer Grant recently was “ill conceived” with serious potential consequences on construction jobs, said UDIA Victorian executive director Tony De Domenico.

A Victorian Government newsletter recently reported that only one quarter of first homebuyers over the past 10 years chose to use the government grant to build a new home, highlighting that the First Home Buyer Grant available for the purchase of new homes and existing homes in Victoria isn’t effective enough in stimulating construction jobs.

UDIA Victoria said purchasing existing homes didn’t boost employment, whereas new homes do and should be taken into serious consideration by government if considering axing the incentive.

De Domenico said the Victorian property industry employs 310,000 full-time employees, contributes around 12 per cent to the state’s gross domestic product and $4.6 billion in taxes to all tiers of government.

“Behind the construction of every new home stands the employment of a range of tradespeople, employment networks of suppliers and ultimately the retail sector with homes requiring white goods, furniture and services,” said De Domenico.

“Investment in new dwellings is a major area of economic activity for thousands of small businesses across the state. At the same time Victoria continues to require housing supply because of population growth,” he said

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/API_Property_News/~3/U0EByzP9-Os/dumping-first-homebuyer-grant-on-new-homes-would-mean-more-job-losses

Australia’s stable economy lures foreign investors

Posted on Monday, April 02 2012 at 11:56 AM

Australia is attracting high-end residential and prime office investment attention from emerging rich-list cities, according to Knight Frank Australia’s 2012 edition of The Wealth Report.

As Shanghai and Beijing emerge as the most rapid growth cities in regards to high net worth individuals, Australia is increasingly being targeted because it offers a stable economy, business transparency and good education systems; prime factors for locating luxury property and prime office buildings, said the report.

Knight Frank Australia executive chairman Stephen Ellis said if China continues its rapid escalation and commodity demand remains strong, Australia’s property market would ride alongside this growth.

“We are upbeat on prospects for cities like Perth and Brisbane that have strong links to the mineral and resources industries,” said Ellis.
“The stable economy, relatively low debt and attractive yields have attracted many offshore investors to Australia.”

Recent examples of prime office purchases in Sydney include the $395 million acquisition of an office building at 259 George Street by a Singapore billionaire, and the $153 million acquisition of two Martin Place office buildings by a South African investor.

“We are seeing an increasing number of international visitors in our boardroom. These are not always the usual suspects, but super wealthy privates from all over the world, especially Asia, who are hungry to buy Australian property,” said Ellis

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Buyer confidence returns to pre-GFC levels

Posted on Wednesday, March 21 2012 at 2:45 PM

A decrease in mortgage stress and an increasing comfort with debt has driven homebuyer confidence up by two per cent this month, returning it back to the higher levels of March 2011, according to the Genworth Homebuyer Confidence Index (HCI).

The HCI, a biannual measure of borrower and would-be borrower sentiment, reports as of March 2012 only one in five homeowners (22 per cent) has experienced mortgage stress in the past 12 months, compared with one in four (25 per cent) in September 2011.

Genworth president and chief executive officer Ellie Comerford said the Reserve Bank’s downward movement of the cash rate has made a difference to confidence despite lenders not passing on the full 50 basis points of cuts.

Comerford said mortgage stress caused by interest rates had eased to 32 per cent this month, down from 50 per cent in September last year.

With house prices easing in recent times, first homebuyers are feeling more at ease when shopping around, with confidence levels up by 1.5 per cent to 99, similar to levels pre-global financial crisis, said Genworth.

The HCI reports only seven per cent of respondents said the location they wished to target was out of their price range, compared with 21 per cent in September last year.

“While cost of living pressures and an increase in unemployment are likely to strain households, currently these problems are being offset by positive factors such as wage growth, low inflation and interest rate cuts. The Australian dream of home ownership is not fading as increasing affordability improves borrower sentiment,” said Comerford.

The HCI also reported the proportion of first homebuyers unable to save for a deposit dropped from 45 per cent to 30 per cent between September 2011 and March 2012.

Turns out the first homebuyers are more optimistic than the average homebuyer, with 84 per cent of those surveyed not expecting difficulty to meet repayments, compared with 78 per cent of average homebuyers.

“The proportion of first homebuyers who said they would be unable to afford repayments fell to 19 per cent down from 38 per cent in September 2011,” said Comerford.

Looking closer at the states, reflective of job confidence, buyer confidence in Western Australia rebounded by 11.2 per cent from a low 90.5 in September 2011 to 100.6 this month.

New South Wales also demonstrated an increase, sliding up by 1.3 per cent from 95.5 to 96.7.

“We have seen a recent stabilisation of property prices in Western Australia which is likely to have boosted confidence. Flatter property prices combined with stable unemployment levels will have driven the spike,” Comerford said.

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Mining’s ripple effect to capital city jobs

Posted on Thursday, March 22 2012 at 2:31 PM

It’s no coincidence that Perth, located in the nation’s leading mining state has seen greater spin-off job growth from the natural resources sector than other major capital cities over the past 12 months while Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney are in warm-up mode, according to job website Seek.

The rapidly growing mining industry’s ability to create a ripple effect from the mine site to the major capital city is exactly what the slow moving housing market has been waiting for.

As the job market heats up again in Perth and employee competition weakens this is likely to lead to potential wage increases and a major confidence boost for investors and homebuyers.

According to Seek, in just 12 months, Perth job advertisements in the mining, resources and energy sector saw a 39 per cent spike in and around the capital, while even further ahead in job growth for Perth were: sport and recreation (42 per cent); manufacturing, transport and logistics (46 per cent); marketing and communications (69 per cent); and self-employment (71 per cent).

In Brisbane over the past 12 months, while the mining, resources and energy sector saw 46 per cent job growth, it wasn’t as far advanced in its spin-off effect on jobs in the capital, with self-employment the only other sector ahead – mind you with an impressive 75 per cent growth – indicating that the spin-off job growth in other sectors is only just warming up.

Adelaide is feeling the effects of the mining sector on new jobs, with 68 per cent job growth in science and technology, 42 per cent growth in marketing and communications roles and a 30 per cent spike in mining, resources and energy roles.

Sydney has seen phenomenal growth in self-employment at 147 per cent, the only sector significantly stimulated so far by the mines. Jobs in and around Sydney in the mining, resources and energy sector grew by 47 per cent over the 12-month period.

While Melbourne has recorded a 54 per cent growth in job ads for the mining, resources and energy sector over the past 12 months and self-employment just behind with 52 per cent growth, many of the mining jobs are fly-in fly-out gigs to South Australia and Western Australia so the flow-on effect to other job sectors is understandably not as significant.

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What the Queensland election ‘can do’ for the property market

Posted on Monday, March 26 2012 at 4:34 PM

A Queensland property boom has up-shifted from ‘likely’ to ‘certain’ following the Queensland state election result, according to Terry Ryder of hotspotting.com.au.

He says the sunshine state was already heading into a real estate recovery, with the resources sector and key indicators suggesting rising property markets, but the Liberal National Party’s smashing of Labor on the weekend is a huge boost for confidence.

“People wanted a change of leadership and they got it,” Ryder says.

“Such a result always engenders confidence, the key element in any property market. Opportunities now beckon to buy well in markets with great growth prospects.”

Incoming Premier Campbell Newman and his LNP Government is expected to win at least 73 of the 89 seats, while Labor currently has just seven seats (although five electorates are still being counted, with Labor leading four of those).

Ryder notes the change of government is timely, because Queensland was already on the brink of major economic recovery.

“The election result will supercharge that because it creates optimism. People will stop saving and start spending. There’s a perception that Campbell Newman is a strong, charismatic, can-do leader. If he can deliver what he promises, people will start behaving in a different way.”

Ryder adds Newman is already at an advantage, because he’ll walk into office at a time when things are beginning to turn around for the state.

“That has nothing with anything to do with what he’s done, he’s just coming in at a perfect time. Queensland is about to become a boom state. That feeling started last year but we’re really starting to see it this year.”

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Property sells at no reserve auction

Posted on Thursday, March 22 2012 at 3:04 PM

Would you ever sell your property without a reserve? In the current Brisbane market, it might be a very brave and even crazy thing to do. But one American vendor took the gamble in Capalaba, instructing the agent to sell the property, no matter what the price.

Ray White agent David Hardman says the ‘no reserve’ auction attracted lots of attention.

“Over 100 groups of buyers came through the house to inspect it and then more than 160 turned up for the auction itself,” he says.

“37 bidders registered on the day and the sale price was well over expected.”

The four-bedroom, two-bathroom property on a large 882-square-metre block went under the hammer for $431,000, which was actually a good result.

As it turns out, the American businessman who owned the property was determined to divest and flick the property, even if it meant copping a loss. He also spent more than $20,000 in renovations before the no reserve auction, putting in some new carpet and gardens.

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