The current COVID lockdown might turn out as a positive for property prices in Sydney, according to one leading buyer’s agent.
With restrictions in place and people no longer able to spend cash at bars, restaurants or on foreign holidays, they may well have more time to look for new homes and investment opportunities, said Lloyd Edge, Director at Aus Property Professionals.
“I think with lockdown and people spending time at home, they’ll eb spending more time looking for properties,” he explained. “If anything, that’s going to start pushing prices more.”
“If we see what happened last year, economists predicted that there’d be up to 40% drop in the housing market and that didn’t happen at all. In fact, the opposite is what we’ve seen this year. If history repeats itself, then what we’ll see in the next weeks is potentially the housing market continue to rise with a buoyancy.”
“For the most of this year, it’s been driven by owner-occupiers and not so much by investors: if lockdown extends, particularly past two weeks, I think there’ll be more investors coming back into the market because they’re more likely to buy properties sight unseen and based on numbers, whereas homeowners want to inspect a property because they want to live in it.”
The saver effect was seen massively at the latter end of 2020 and in the early part of 2021, when property prices shot up to record levels.
“People generally feel a lot more positive sentiments, particularly those who have had income, who have been able to save ever since COVID started because they haven’t had overseas holidays and mostly haven’t been able to go interstate,” said Lloyd Edge.
“They’re reviewing and reassessing where they are in life: some are buying investment properties, others are buying in regional and coastal areas because they want that lifestyle change away from the city. People are looking at their money and what they can do with it. It comes back to searching through the property market and looking at those big dreams.”
