Welcome to our October property update.

After over 100 days of lockdown we are now able to move around again, and once again get used to traffic jams again going about our daily lives.

It will also be great to now see more properties come to market, from those that did not want to sell during lockdown.

Highlights

• The Australian Residential Property Market is now worth $9.1 Trillion, with 55.4% of household wealth held in housing. 
• In Sydney, property values are up 1.9% for September, 5.7% for the quarter and 23.6% for the year.
• Auction clearance rate hovering around 85%. 
• The Reserve Bank has again left interest rates on hold at 0.1%.  
• Government bond purchases were kept at $4 billion per week, to be maintained until at least February 2022. 
• APRA have increased the loan serviceability assessment rate buffer from 2.5 percentage points to 3.0 percentage points, starting from 1st November.  
• Debt to income ratios of six or more jumped to 21.9% of new mortgage lending, so regulators and policy makers will be monitoring this closely. 
• In terms of properties on market, Sydney is down 20.9% in this period last year, rest of NSW is down 42.9% and Australia is down 23.2%. 
• Rents are up across Australia by 8.9% but gross rental yields have dropped to 3.3% across Australia, with Sydney now at 2.5%.  

My outlook for the remainder of the year remains the same, and I predict prices will finish the year higher than now.