23 Jul 2020

Despite a global health crisis, fears of a second wave and ongoing market jitters, buying activity in new communities have bounced back beyond ‘pre-COVID-19’ levels to reveal a bright outlook in an otherwise mixed market.

During the apparent height of the crisis in QLD, we looked through our project list and happened upon an interesting phenomenon – whilst the headlines were saying one thing, the data was saying another. We’ve done a deep dive into our current projects underway and realised that sales and transactions have skyrocketed in the past few months.

We took four of our large new community projects (>1000 lots) spread across the SEQ region and reached out to these key clients to extract live sales data to see what the numbers said. As can be seen in the figure below, an interesting trend is revealed.

 

What’s going on? And what does this mean? Let’s dig deeper.

Looking into the timing of the upswing – we noticed an interesting correlation. The Government stimulus packages, and super drawdown availability meant that a (single) first home buyer in QLD could walk into a new community with $60,000 of cash and purchase a package of house and land. An impressive amount of money – without much effort at all!

We’ve mapped out some of the stimulus timings above but wanted to explain this a little more:

 

In addition to the potential ‘cash in hand’ measures above, the State also provides a Stamp Duty Concession that is available at most price points in new communities in QLD.

Potentially the largest barrier to entry to the housing market (the deposit) can nearly be removed, therefore we have seen significant uptake in sales within the new communities sector over the past few months.

On top of this, we are anecdotally seeing a change in buyer values. We think this shift in values could be a result of the quarantine lockdown and a revaluation of ‘what really matters’ to them.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on our new community projects (both small and large) to see if this upward trend in buying continues. We are also keen to look to the future and ask what all this means for buyers, developers, the community, planner, and designers. 

If you have any questions, please reach out to Kirsten Wilson or Ed Johnson.