There are so many different ways that the media sources interpret their housing market statistics, but, mostly the percentage increases or decreases rarely relate directly back to the statistics required to interpret what’s actually happening within each of the acreage sectors.

IMPORTANT: Every acreage property has to be assessed on its own merits, improvements, situation and nature.

Property statistics are general broad-brush indicators and even in the housing sector some properties will set new street records, whereas, often a similar property in the same street may sell at a much lower price due to forced sale circumstances or appointment of an under-skilled agent using a poorly executed marketing campaign.

Also, a lot of statistics are based upon sales that have settled, whereas, a switched-on real estate agent normally has their finger on the pulse about current offers, under contract pricing and unconditional exchanged prices.

Whereas Tim Lawless from CoreLogic reported in a recent article, that “The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports on housing prices quarterly using a stratified median methodology. This method is different to CoreLogic’s hedonic regression series; in simple terms, the stratification methodology measures price changes across a number of ‘strata’ or sub-regions before aggregating the data back to the capital city level. Generally the ABS and CoreLogic measures show very similar trends over time, however, the CoreLogic series is more timely (one day in arrears), higher frequency (monthly rather than quarterly) and provided across small regions as well as quartile and decile based valuation cohorts.”

Sydney
The ABS reported a 3.6% rise in Sydney housing values over the quarter compared with a 3.5% rise in the CoreLogic index. The growth trend is skewed towards houses (+4.0%) compared with the unit sector (+2.8%). Since the September quarter, the CoreLogic index has continued to gather pace, with November results showing Sydney housing values rose at their fastest monthly pace since 1988.

As explained in Tim Lawless’s article, “Differences between the indices can be explained by a number of factors. Although both index providers utilise the same source data (CoreLogic supplies the record level data that powers the ABS residential property price index), the methodologies for cleaning and filtering the underlying transaction data are likely to be very different, and there are also likely to be differences in how property types are derived (houses v units). Of course there are also the pure methodological differences with the ABS utilising a stratified median while CoreLogic prefers a hedonic regression series.

Despite the differences, its clear that over time both series show very similar trends. The housing market is clearly on a strong recovery path in the largest cities and growth is now rippling out to many of the smaller capital cities.”

There are several suppliers of property data information like SQM Research “who is an independent property advisory and forecasting research house which specialises in providing accurate property related advice, research & data” along with Australian Property Monitors APM who “as a leading property intelligence platform in Australia since 1989, deliver data to banking, insurance, media, real estate and government industries; making it easier to navigate data for better insights and business growth.”

Then there’s the valuers, like Herron Todd White who provide their monthly report which includes the National Property Clock.

No two acreage properties are the same and the perceived value is highly subjective and can be influenced by numerous external and personal factors.

So whilst the property data reporting about the housing sector is extremely interesting to track and use to reinforce decisions to invest within different markets, how much your property has changed in price within the current market is definitely NOT a simple One-Size-Fits-All answer.

If you’d like to how to maximise the value of your property and get a professional indication of what your acreage property should sell for in the current market, please feel welcome to contact me personally or Request An Appraisal

I hope you found this article helpful.

Regards

Greg Vincent

PS: For an insight into The Year in Property, see today’s article by John McGrath here