I thought the market was supposed to be soft!

In the last few weeks I’ve seen a 3-bedroom house that was barely liveable and not worth a dollar more than $1.125m sell for $1.248m.   Then a couple of days later a 2-bedroom apartment which was worth $700k sold for $750k.  Following on from that the Sydney Morning Herald showcased a property that was valued at $1.3m which sold for $2.2m after two buyers became entangled in an auction bidding war.  In contrast there are also a few properties of late selling below what I would have expected, one of which we purchased for a client.  So what is going on?

Well there’s no question that part of the Sydney property market is soft, however this really applies mostly to the upper end of the market which I classify as property that is priced 30% or more over the medium suburb price.  Anything around or below the medium price seems to be moving along quite well.

The bottom line is if you’re buying and selling in the same market the price variations should only concern you if you're downsizing as you're selling from a softer part of the market into a firmer part right now however if you're trading up then you might as well get on with it.