A week is a long time in anyone’s language but right now, a week seems like months ago to many of us.

Life as we know it has changed and to me, it seems almost surreal right now.

Driving around and seeing every second business closed is quite confronting and reading the heartbreaking stories from those that have no job or those that have a business that’s been decimated is really hard to comprehend…and really quite heartbreaking.

It’s hard to know how the next few weeks will unfold as many of us didn’t foresee such drastic changes over the past seven days but I guess it’s a balance of keeping people alive (and eradicating this virus as quickly as possible) to keeping the economy afloat in some capacity.

Whilst we may save lives by shutting down the economy, it’s hard to know how many lives will be destroyed through financial hardship.

Effects will likely be seen for years resulting in divorce and broken families and even extreme consequences such as suicide.

Reading posts from friends, relatives, clients and stories on Social Media are just awful and I must admit to feeling quite hollow as I write this blog today…and the property market does seem somewhat trivial in the scheme of things right now.

In saying that, this blog is about real estate and more about the effects of the Coronavirus on the property market and I’ll do my best to stick to this topic.

Last night, the Prime Minister made the decision to ban all auctions and open homes across the country…a move that we could see coming and one that was not in the least bit surprising.

It seems his message may not have been clear as we’ve had many clients, friends, relatives and even members of the general public send us messages of support today, asking us if we’re OK due to our industry being “shut down”.

We’ve clarified the position of the Government and I can assure you that we are still able to operate in full capacity (less the ability to run open homes and public auctions).

On Monday this week, we had already made the decision to avoid running open homes as we want to make sure you’re doing our bit to keep people apart in an attempt to defeat the spread of COVID-19.

We are still able to conduct private inspections, one-on-one appointments, listing appointments, appraisals, rental operations etc.

What hasn’t changed over the past week is that we’re still surprisingly busy right now, in fact, we’re actually busier this week than last week.

We have quite a few new properties to the market, lots of inspections, appraisals, etc.

We’ve noticed that some of our clients have decided to place their plans to sell on hold for the moment but there’s plenty of sellers that feel now is the time to sell given there won’t be as much stock on the market…and given we had pretty good numbers through open homes last weekend, there’s evidence to suggest that this might be the case.

We’ve sold quite a number of homes over the past week and as I write this, we’re negotiating a number of offers on properties so it seems that the market will continue to move on despite what’s happening around us.

Our major advertising medium (realestate.com.au) has announced that they will provide extended periods of time if listings aren’t sold within the designated time frame (completely free of charge) and many sellers feel that this is a good time to take advantage of such an offer.

At Innov8 Property, we’re taking advantage of modern technologies such as virtual walk-through inspections (either through facetime, skype or other video options) as well as electronic contracting signing from the comfort of your own home and even if you need to visit a property, we’re ensuring that we run buyers through a property one family at a time and we’re using hand sanitiser, disinfectant and other hygiene products to ensure that you don’t even need to touch a door handle if you don’t want to.

We’ll be running private inspections this weekend so if you do wish to view any of our properties (physically or digitally), feel free to contact us and we’ll make a time for you.

From a Property Management perspective, we’ve postponed routine inspections as we don’t wish to place any of our tenants at risk but we’re encouraging tenants to take photos and e-mail us any urgent maintenance issues so that we can still ensure they’re looked after to the best of our ability.

So how will the property market be affected now?

I still stand by my statement last week that I don’t believe prices will be affected to a large degree.

There will almost certainly be less transactions in the coming months with fewer sellers and fewer buyers prioritising property whilst the world is in turmoil but we believe that supply and demand numbers will cancel each other out to a large degree.

There’s an interesting news article published last weekend in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ that supports this theory and feel free to read it in my ‘Insights’ section today.

Once the worst is over and we “flatten the curve” as our Prime Minister describes it, we can see property bounce quite strongly given the record low interest rates and the release of the build-up of those who’ve waited to move finally bringing their plans to fruition.

Let’s hope we can all move on and return to normal activities in less time than has been anticipated.

Until next week, Happy Listing and Happy Selling but more importantly…Happy Isolating, Happy Social Distancing and we sincerely hope that everyone can find a way to get through this crisis with your health and finances intact.