As we have been stating for some time and was again confirmed this week, the market is still continuing to fall in the order of 10 to 20% for most homes in inner Melbourne since February. Reading recent stats from the various authorities the fall has been greater in inner Melbourne than outer Melbourne however behind those stats we think you will find that at least inner Melbourne is still transacting at a relatively strong rate.  We still have an incredible amount of homes on the market compared to last year and with lower clearance rates the numbers of unsold properties are building each week.

Six auctions at million dollars and above we attended this last Saturday

8 Churchill Grove Kew (Rating 543 out of 1000). Nice period home in a great position but had three big negatives – south facing so poorer light, no car parking and no obvious room for it and smaller rooms. Auction was attended by around 70 people and started with a vendor bid at 1.1m – two bidders took it to 1.13 and it was sold afterwards between 1.1 and 1.2m



39 Alfred St Kew (Rating 859 out of 1000). Good Strong Auction well conducted by Iain Carmichael of Bennison Mackinnon. This is a great block (north facing rear and sitting proud) in a great street with its only criticism being not deep. It was expected to go well and it did with 3 strong bidders taking it from 1.6million to ‘on the market’ at 1.75million, to sold at $2,040,000. Making land value for good house building blocks in the Sackville Road area $2400 a square metre and again reinforcing that irrespective of the market quality attracts.

47 Donald St Prahran (Rating 691 out of 1000) and we may have been a little harsh with our rating. This lovely Victorian with a great feel had very strong bidding – as it should and achieved $1,505,000 after a number of strong bidding duels between several interested parties. James Redfern of Marshall White was in charge of proceeding and a strong but expected result was achieved for the vendor.



13 Goodall Street Hawthorn (Rating 884 out of 1000).  A lovely Victorian with oodles of space, very well renovated and last year would in our opinion have sailed past $3million. After a big turn out of well over a 100 people and some strong bidding the property was passed into the highest bidder at $2.8m and later sold between that and $3million (exact amount undisclosed). Well conducted campaign by James Tostevin.



9 Arthur St Brighton. Cutting edge design that just didn’t fire at auction and with good reason. This property was originally advertised at 2.9m private sale and was then auctioned. It is very difficult to sell a property at auction after you have told the market the price you are chasing. Consequently it didn’t sell. A vendor bid was announced at around 2.45m then 2.5m saw it passed in with no expressed interest despite 80 people being in attendance.



14 Forbes St Essendon, (Rating 781 out 1000) As expected was passed-in. A big ticket was wanted on this property and despite our high rating (based largely on the brilliant quality of the home), it didn’t sell because in our opinion, the home and asking price didn’t match the street. When looking at property we always need to consider the 3 P’s and two of those P’s on this one (Price and Position) didn’t match up with the other P (Property).

Overall you can see many of the results below and some million dollar suburbs are really continuing to struggle –  Bayside in Hampton and Sandringham and then on the eastern front Balwyn and Nth Balwyn.

One final word – with Melbourne now being the 4th most affordable capital city and a big drop in real terms having been experienced in the last few months, now might be the time to consider hopping into the market – after all it won’t stay this way forever.