Newly advertised properties fueling rise in property listings

Both new and total listings are rising as we see most years throughout Spring. Although the number of newly advertised properties are much higher than a year ago, total stock levels continue to track lower due to a rapid rate of sale.

Each week RP Data tracks the number of properties listed for sale across the country, including those advertised on on-line portals and those within newspapers. As you can imagine, individual listings are duplicated across all these sources which is why it is extremely important to de-duplicate the properties in order to determine a unique count of listings.

Although we monitor listings weekly, we publish our unique count based on a rolling 28 day basis which provides a smoother trend than the weekly count. As at the week ended 26 October 2014, there were, 51,081 unique new properties advertised for sale and 195,655 unique re-listed properties across the county. The number of new listings were at their highest level since the 4 weeks ending 23 March 2014. Meanwhile, the number of re-listed properties was at its highest level since the four weeks ended 24 August 2014.

As the first chart shows we are seeing a ramp-up in new listings at a national level while spring progresses, while total listings have risen a little they are much lower than they have been over recent years.

Across the combined capital cities, the trends are quite similar. Over the four weeks to 26 October 2014 there were 32,706 unique new properties listed for sale and 73,189 unique re-listed properties. Capital city new listings account for 64% of total new listings nationally while capital city re-listings account for just 37% of all re-listings nationally. This highlights that capital city stock is being absorbed much quicker than stock in non-capital city regions. As a result the number of re-listed properties is much higher across the regional areas of the country.

Looking around the country, in all capital cities except for Darwin, there has been an increase in new listings over the past couple of months. This is an occurrence that we see each year as the market enters spring. The total number of properties advertised for sale has also increased over recent weeks highlighting an increase in the amount of residential property available for sale.

VIEW CITY-BY-CITY GRAPHS

Focussing on the variations on a city-by-city basis we can see different trends emerging. It is clear that the rise in home values in Sydney is being at least partly fuelled by very low stock levels coupled by very strong demand spurred on by low mortgage rates. In Melbourne, stock levels are quite high, potentially suggesting that the rise in values is perhaps more driven by speculation than a shortage of effective supply levels. Brisbane is seeing stock levels trend lower in line with a moderate rise in sales and values. Adelaide stock levels had been reducing but have seen a fairly sharp rise over recent weeks. In Perth stock levels have been relatively stable now for a number of years. Stock in Hobart is falling as sales volumes rise. Darwin is experiencing a trend towards higher levels of stock available for sale. Finally Canberra stock levels are also now rising as the market slows.

The number of properties available for sale is likely to broadly continue to rise over the coming weeks before we see the inevitable slowdown late in December and throughout January as vendors pause their listing activity. We would expect thereafter listings will rise once more however, it is likely they will not return to those levels of late December and will continue to trend lower early in 2015.