Covid-19 has brought about downside risks for the economy and housing market. A 0.3% decline in March’s GDP confirmed a technical recession is underway in Australia. Total wages paid fell by 5.4% between mid-March and early May and Australian dwelling market values saw the first month-on-month decline since June last year, which by itself is not that bad of a result, given the circumstances and compared to literally the rest of the world.

One not so surprising sign of stabilising emerged in May. Home sales have risen, with home owners testing the market and new listings are rising. In fact, buyer demand is outweighing the volume of new listings.

This can be observed in the “Rolling 28-day listings count”. In the 28 days to the 31st of May new listings rose by 22.4% compared to the previous period while the total amount of listings fell by 2.9%.

What we can get out of that is that there are more properties sold than new properties are brought onto the market, which is of course what we love to see, as undersupply results in price increases.

This fact will no doubt surprise a lot of the so-called economists but we are not surprised as the housing market is solid and strong, something we’ve maintained during the whole of the Covid-19 crisis.

The ANZ Roy Morgan weekly consumer confidence index has risen consecutively for the past 9 weeks, well, that’s something for the doom thinkers to think about. At the week ending on the thirty first of May, the index was 50.5% higher than when it bottomed out in late March. In fact, the index is now only 9% lower than when Australia confirmed its first case of coronavirus in January.

In addition to all that, the kind of workers most impacted by covid-19 are those that are statistically less likely to have mortgage debt, which could be another reason why the property market has held so strongly and is now on the way up.

As I continue to pick out more and more positive news from in between all the negative stuff being thrown into the universe, I clearly see the property market is behaving generally as anticipated and more and more people will start to see this also with even more improvement to the property market.