Sydney’s apartment market continues to drive interest across all types of buyers, according to the latest market snapshot from leading property firm Urbis.
The Q3/Q4 2015 Urbis Sydney Apartment Essentials report revealed a relatively even proportion of sales to local owner occupiers (38%) and local investors (37%) in Q4 2015; while foreign investors followed closely behind with 24% of sales.
We attribute this result to the banks’ tightening lending practices to investors, enabling local owner occupiers to exceed investors in the proportion of buyers in the second half of 2015.
The Sydney Apartment Market remains strong despite reports that projects are not selling out in a weekend as previously. Urbis monitored over 140 projects in the second half of 2015 and we recorded strong off the plan prices, exceeding $1 million as a weighted average of surveyed sales.
This represented an increase of 4% from Q3 2015, which reflected the launch of large up-market projects on the fringe of the CBD in Q4 2015.
Future supply also remains abundant with 67 projects approved and 131 in application and we expect this to remain strong as supply is still catching up from a historical undersupply.
At the end of 2015, two bedroom two bathroom apartments comfortably attracted the highest proportion of apartment sales, accounting for 46% of all surveyed transactions.
The report also covered developments in the Parramatta and North West Middle Ring regions, which presented significant development activity. In fact, Parramatta, with 37 active projects recorded, has the highest level of activity among all regions surveyed.
