We're quickly heading towards the end of January (believe it or not) and the holiday season now seems like nothing more than a distant memory (to me anyway).

Here are a few conclusions I can confidently draw about the real estate market right now…

1. There are plenty of brand new buyers in the marketplace – we often see a good number of new buyers in the market in early-to-mid January who weren’t looking in December. It would seem that people make decisions over the Christmas break about upsizing, downsizing, relocating or just wanting a change of scenery. However this year, we’ve already noticed that the number of brand new buyers to the market is huge – way more than we’ve seen over the past 7-8 years.

2. There are still plenty of current buyers in the marketplace – we’ve experienced quite a number of buyers stating that they have looked for some time and now just want to secure a property quickly. These sorts of buyers are pure gold – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a buyer search for months and when they’re starting to become frustrated, they will virtually buy the next home that’s in front of them…and pay a premium price because they can’t be bothered looking any more. We’ve already seen many instances of this so far this year.

3. January is usually a good time to sell your home but this January may prove better than it has for years – Comparatively speaking, there aren’t truckloads of new properties on the market at this stage (although statistics show an increase of approximately 30% on the number of listings fresh to the market in the first 21 days of the year) but the new buyers to the market are already in full swing as I’ve mentioned. Over the past three Saturdays, the number of buyers we’re averaging at open homes is already up more than 40% on what it was for the entire 2017. This figure is more remarkable when we consider that we’ve had several of our properties attract more buyers through one of the open homes in January than they did when they were first listed late last year so there’s definitely a positive move out there.

4. Buyer enquiry numbers are up 80% on what they were this time last year – simple numbers yet again, but this speaks volumes about where we’re heading. We’ve totaled the number of e-mail enquiries, phone calls and open home attendees and there’s no question that our numbers are better than they have been for a long time…and I should mention, we have less properties for sale right now than we did at this time last year.

5. Selling prices are higher than expected – Of our past 10 sales, we’ve sold 7 of them for figures that were higher than what we had appraised them, 2 were within the price range that we originally provided and the final sale was just a touch lower a few thousand dollars than what we had appraised it for. Taking the figures into account as a whole, our selling prices were approximately 106% of the appraised price (last year, we averaged approximately 102% for the entire year). This might seem like a small increase but on a property worth, say $500,000, that’s an extra $20,000!

6. Appraisal numbers are up 10% on what they were this time last year (and interestingly, last January was our busiest month of the year for the numbers of properties we appraised). This is probably the most interesting statistic of them all. It’s a pretty hard figure to interpret as we can’t be sure whether this is similar for all agents or are we just getting more business with the natural progressive growth of our business. I can tell you that (historically speaking) when we appraise large numbers of properties and other agents are reporting the same, it often results in plenty of listings hitting the market within 3 months of the activity. That might sound strange as it isn’t completely logical that people take this long to make a decision but I can tell you that plenty of the them do. One of the great things about Social media is that I often monitor private real estate agent groups and try to get a feel for the general vibe of the market. At this stage, many are reporting large numbers of buyers but there’s also many that seem to be appraising and listing plenty right now as well so there may well be a significant increase of listings in the second quarter of the year which (if this happens), will slow the price increases that we’re seeing right now.

I do often share my opinion on where the market is at and where it is heading in these newsletters.

Interestingly, it’s the most common question I’m asked when I chat to people so I feel that many have an interest on where things are heading.

If you’re not into statistics then this newsletter may be a little intensive on numbers but timing is everything and it’s easy to make $30,000 – $40,000 fairly quickly if you can predict the movement of the market and beat the crowd – I’ve seen it time and time again.

Until next week…Happy Listing & Happy Selling.