Phil's Property Corner - Building grants create flurry in Perth property market!

July 07, 2020 by Rebecca Crommelin

We're kicking off a new financial year with the latest Perth property updates with Phil Bertram, owner of Candour Property Group. As well as everything you need to know about the government building grants and the impacts. Check it out below. 

Happy New Financial Year to you all. We’ve seen quite an interesting end to the 2019/20 Financial Year with Perth’s property sales activity in June increasing by a significant 55% from May. The median price has held steady at $475,000, as has the median rental price at $350 per week. Rental activity is stable, down 3% from May. You can find their monthly update video here.

In an effort to boost new home builds and construction jobs there have been unprecedented monetary grants released by both the Federal and WA State governments. The Federal government is paying $25,000 towards builds or renovations (must be to live in) and the WA State government is paying $20,000 for any new dwellings (for either owner occupied or investment). These are both in addition to the existing $10,000 First Home Buyers Grant, bringing the grants total to $55,000 for first home buyers, $45,000 for non-first home buyers.

As expected this has prompted a flurry of market activity, with June showing the highest sales figures in 5 years. This market activity has also started tipping the scales towards sellers, which we have not seen in the Perth market for a very long time. There are already signs that this is having an impact on increasing sales prices and rental prices, PerthNow has an interesting article exploring this here.

It is important to balance out our perspective by keeping an eye on the bigger picture however, in the few months WA has lost over 100,000 jobs. This has increased the unemployment rate to over 8 per cent for only the second time since 1985. These numbers were collected in May before the restrictions started to ease, so there is hope that the true numbers are lower than this. We will know a lot more over the coming months as the restrictions in WA hopefully continue to ease. There is an excellent article that covers this on WAToday here. 

The implications of these job losses may not be seen for a number of months and it could impact on the resilience of any property price recovery. However if you are considering building a house, there has never been anywhere near the amount of money being offered to you ($55,000 as a first home buyer, $45,000 if not your first home). The particularly important thing to remember is that any potential purchase you make is for a reasonable price, there are already land developers pushing prices up unreasonably as well as many builders increasing prices significantly. There’s very little point claiming a government grant if you’ve spent that much extra on the property, all you would be doing is putting dollars in the bank accounts of developers and builders.

How can we help? Now more than ever it is important to have an advocate working for you. Candour’s job is to find you want you want, working with you to negotiate a fair price on the land and an excellent price from the builder. These grants won’t be here forever, both of them expire at the end of December and available land in Perth is getting snapped up very quickly.

If you would like to discuss any of the above and how it applies to you, we are here to help. To arrange for Phil to call you please email him with your name and contact number on phil@candourproperty.com.au and he’ll be in touch.