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Real estate agents would be well versed to focus on first home buyers in the current environment, according to two industry heavyweights.
On a recent episode of What’s Making Headlines with Phil Tarrant and Tom Panos, the two hosts reflected on the current market and the balancing out of buyer demographics that’s currently taking place Australia-wide.
“We’ve seen a natural equilibrium now for first home buyers — emerging as one of the steady growing areas within buying and real estate transactions,” REB’s Mr Tarrant noted.
His observations come as news broke that first home buyers had already reserved approximately 65 per cent of the places available in the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme (FHLDS) for the financial year, in the second iteration of the policy that kicked off on 1 July 2020.
He flagged how the regulatory body on investment lending, APRA, first began attempting to slow down the property market in 2017 and 2018 to avoid problems of affordability and price ballooning.
These efforts can, in part, be attributed to returning the market to a first home buyer–centric one.
“For a lot of agents, traditionally, investors have been a big buyer of properties, or sellers of properties,” the director acknowledged.
“But don’t forget the first home buyers right now. They’re active right now. Money is as cheap as it has ever been.”
It’s a phenomenon that Mr Panos is also seeing as an auctioneer.
“[Anything] under $800,000 — they’re flying out like hotcakes,” he said.
The trend towards first home buying is confirmation that “there are people out there buying properties right now”, Mr Tarrant reminded real estate agents.
“You can sit around and complain about listing volumes [being] down, and that there’s not many opportunities out there, but those properties that you can list, you should be able to sell in this market,” Mr Tarrant said.
“There’s someone out there to buy it.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grace Ormsby
Grace is a journalist across Momentum property and investment brands. Grace joined Momentum Media in 2018, bringing with her a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Communication (Journalism) from the University of Newcastle. She’s passionate about delivering easy to digest information and content relevant to her key audiences and stakeholders.
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