What’s Next

Market insights from the guy with the gavel, Haesley Cush 

MUM and I go for a walk around New Farm Park, in Brisbane’s inner city, every Monday. It is a weekly ritual that was born out of the Covid lockdowns and it’s now a part of our routine. 

On this week’s walk we discussed the sale of a home in Tarragindi for $3.15m! We had spent a lot of time living in Tarragindi when mum was the local Ray White principal and so this sale was hot property news. 

Mum was discussing this new benchmark – $3m-plus – and remarking how prices had changed. It was only 20 years ago that $200,000 was an astonishing amount of money for a home and that high end homes that cracked $350,000 were eye-watering . 

So, ‘where will it go from here?’ was the mystery we would solve on this stroll. I told her about an online auction I had conducted this week. We had a buyer from Melbourne who had registered to bid. He hadn’t identified which property, but he had made some inquiries on a couple of the ones we were selling. But he hadn’t inspected them, as he was in Melbourne. He bid on two of them, both above $2m. He didn’t buy either, but his willingness to bid at that price shows buyers’ comfort at these levels. As we rounded the rose garden to finish our walk, we noted that Brisbane has been undervalued for quite some time. 

New homes have been selling for cost or even lower in recent years and units were selling for considerably lower than purchase prices. The value was obvious. We are now having a growth spurt and it’s only those buyers looking in the rear vision mirror who are hurting. 

Our market has changed and with a forward outlook you can see more massive changes coming. With those changes we will start to see these larger prices become more and more normal in the suburban ring of the city. 

This article is from the August 15 issue of The Courier Mail Digital Edition. To subscribe, visit https://www.couriermail.com.au/.