Australia’s housing market is showing signs of improvement. In CoreLogic’s Home Value Index Report we can see that national dwelling values dropped by 0.4% over August, compared to 0.6% over July, meaning that the rate of decline has slowed. We’ve flattened the curve, so to speak.

Let’s pick out the top 3 of capital cities, in order of improvement.

Sydney saw a drop of 0.9% in July and a drop of 0.5%t in August, an improvement of 0.4%.

Brisbane dropped by 0.4%t in July and seems to be bottoming out already with a drop of 0.1% in August.

And then Melbourne, which matched a drop of 1.2% in July with another drop of 1.2% in August. Without context, it doesn’t sound too great, but taking into account that July probably was the darkest month, from an emotional perspective, with pretty much the whole month in Stage 4 lockdown. Living in Melbourne myself, I remember hearing the announcement and thinking I was not looking forward to those 6 weeks. I can imagine a lot of people would have felt similar, or worse. So in that perspective, a drop of only 1.2% is actually a good performance. Still, thousands of properties have sold in Melbourne in July— just not via auctions for the majority of them.

It just re-emphasises that the property market is in good nick. There are virtually no panic sales. The government support continues to protect us from a lot worse than we see now.

A quick look at the other capital cities:

Adelaide held steady with 0.0 %.
Perth also held steady, up from a 0.6% drop in July.
Hobart was up 0.1%, from a drop of 0.2% in July.
Darwin was up 1% from a drop of 0.3% in July and lastly:
Canberra was up 0.5%.

So as I hope you now also clearly see, things looked pretty good in August and in Melbourne, we are hopefully not far off from the easing of at least some restrictions and I reckon I’ll have an even more positive message next month.

Probably not an overall national increase of values, but that will happen this year.