Every year around August, real estate agents and news media start chattering about the upcoming “Spring selling season”. The general theme is that this is the best time to sell, because flowers will be blooming and there will be optimism in the air as temperatures rise. But the same people who proclaim this to be the best time for vendors, also declare that this is the best time to buy. By definition, it cannot be both. If it’s a sellers’ market, it’s difficult to argue credibly that it’s a buyers’ market at the same time. Such is the nature of hype and hyperbole in the residential property industry. The truth is that there is no best season is which to sell or buy real estate.

We’ve seen significant improvement in markets across Regional Victoria recently, as the state joins the recovery momentum seen in many markets across Australia. Our latest survey of market activity shows that, in Regional Victoria, the revival has gone to another level lately. Our research shows that, in the latest quarter, the number of declining locations has halved and the number recovering locations has more than doubled. Locations with positive rankings in our survey have increased from 45% of total Regional Victoria locations to 65%, led by a surge in the number of towns and suburbs classified as recovering markets. 53 locations previously ranked as declining or plateau markets are now classified as recovering markets, up from 24 in the previous quarter, while the number of locations with negative classifications have dropped from 71 to 47. At the same time, locations previously ranked as recovering markets have continued to improve and are now classified as rising markets.

Here’s a quick quiz to see whether you’ve been paying attention lately.

Question one: How many times have predictions of things like property prices falling off a cliff appeared in media headlines in the past, say, three years?

Question two: How many times have things actually gone ahead and fallen off the forecast cliff?

Question three: Should we be listening any more to journalists and economists who predict these dire cliff disasters?

So, how did you go with the quiz?

I don’t have the exact number of headlines which have forecast a mortgage cliff or a market cliff or prices falling off a cliff, but it would number in the thousands so far in this decade of the 2020s.

Now, as to how many times things have actually fallen off the alleged cliff, I do have a precise answer: exactly zero times.

We were told property prices would fall off a cliff in 2020 but they rose.

The Melbourne market has staged a remarkable turnaround, transitioning from a struggling market to one showing promise of considerable buoyancy in the near future.

Three months ago we reported the first signs of recovery across Greater Melbourne markets, but our latest quarterly survey of sales activity has provided compelling evidence that Melbourne is now coming back strongly.

The number of locations classified as rising markets has increased five-fold and recovering markets have quadrupled, while plateau markets have halved and the number of declining suburbs has dropped by 67 to just 9.

That’s quite a turnaround.

I should be accustomed to watching politicians failing to fix problems, but somehow I can never get used to it.

The capacity for Australian politicians to blunder when we need them to excel is quite extraordinary.

And I think part of the problem is that politicians are really only interested in the press conference and haven’t thought much beyond that.

And so it is with the political response to the housing crisis.

The Prime Minister got together with all the state and territory premiers and first ministers to talk about fixing the housing shortage.

These are our national leaders, the people we have elected to fix problems - like not enough dwellings, the absence of affordability and the sharp rise in residential rents.

So they got together and talked about it and then held a press conference in front of the assembled media.

What they presented was laughable.

1. Is 2023 a time of opportunity for property investors?
2. Where are investors getting good results from capital growth and rental returns?
3. Which regions have the best growth indicators?
4. Is this a good time for investors to undertake new builds?
5. Should investors be deterred by politicians tinkering with the market?
6. Where do you go for accurate information and sensible advice?

Media loves to place great significance on insignificant data, with month-to- month changes in prices, rents, vacancies and building approvals given implications and connotations that they simply don’t deserve. The advice, as always, is to ignore them.

Some property owners use short-term letting rather than long-term residential tenants and they’ve been blamed by some in politics for the rental shortage – but an independent university study has confirmed what we already know, that Airbnb has not caused the national rental shortage crisis.

The history of residential real estate in Australia is, in one sense, a story of defiance. Economists and journalists keep predicting dire outcomes and property markets keep proving them wrong. 2023 has provided a wonderful case study for that. The year began with a plethora of predictions from the usual suspects – senior economists working for the Big 4 banks, the nation’s worst real estate forecaster Shane Oliver from AMP Capital, and a host of others. The common feature of their forecasts was that prices, they said, would fall in 2023.