Regional NT Property Market Update February 2020

Alice Springs Property Updates

December and January are historically slow months for the property market in Alice Springs as school holidays and the festive season usually see a mass exodus of Centralians to the coastal areas of Australia. Who can blame them, after all; Alice Springs is the town closest to every beach in Australia!

It remains firmly a buyer’s market in Alice Springs, with agents having to re-set vendors expectations in a number of cases in order to achieve a sale. Annual sales statistics have shown another mediocre year in terms of the total number of residential sales (dwellings and units combined). Only 283 sales were recorded in 2019, compared to 321 in 2018. This is a far cry from the halcyon days of 2007 when there was a total of 496 sales. The median house price has dipped by two percent for the year, down to $470,000, whilst the median unit price has increased two percent to $310,000. This increase in the median unit price is most likely due to some strong sales in the upper end of the unit market pushing up the average rather than a general upturn in the market.

Older two-bedroom units continue to slide in value, due in part to the abundance of new or totally refurbished unit developments completed in recent years. This oversupply has seen a number of unit developments stall or be deferred in the absence of sufficient pre-sales.

The past few months have seen some really strong individual sale outcomes. Two adjoining units in a complex on the golf course both sold for over $600,000 and a rural lifestyle property changed hands for $1.2 million, one of only two residential sales for the year that exceeded $1 million. This proves that there is still a market for these prestige properties in Alice Springs, although there are few participants active at this end of the market.

In the coming months, there seems little to get excited about as far as an upturn in the real estate market is concerned and the market is expected to continue to bounce along at (or near) the bottom for the foreseeable future.