Money.com.au commissioned a survey of an independent panel of 1003 Australians to discover whether homebuyers intend to purchase a property at a lower price point and the actions they will take to reduce the cost.

• Nearly half of respondents (43 per cent) said they would hold off on purchasing a property for a few months as they expect prices to continue to fall
• While 12 per cent revealed they would purchase a smaller home
• And 11 per cent would buy in a lower-priced area.
  Other steps respondents indicated they would take included buying an older home that required updates, as chosen by 9 per cent
• And buying a property with family to create a multigenerational home (chosen by 4 per cent).

What does this mean?

If we’ve got around half of the buyers coming to open homes, and we still have another 43% to attend, it means the slightest sign of the market going up, might see a huge increase in attendees to open home numbers. Meaning more competition between buyers, meaning prices will likely go back up.

In 2019, I was looking to buy. Our budget wasn’t where we wanted it, and well, we couldn’t find the property we wanted in the location we wanted. We found one in the suburb we wanted, but we missed out by $15,000 and some terribly dodgy real estate practices.

Another agent in the office said to me, “the market is going to crash soon, just wait for it to crash the buy dirt cheap“.

I didn’t wait, but there weren’t a lot of properties hitting the market in our budget, so we thought lets wait to see more properties hit the market and continue to save more deposit, well we know what happened in 2020. We technically had a recession and then a certain health pandemic hit, and we saw buyers go beserk with all their additional cash they’d saved by not travelling.

In 2020, there was no way we were going to be able to purchase a property, for a start I didn’t have time to attend open homes on Saturdays, and Sarah is one of the most indecisive people you’ll meet, let alone when looking to spend best part of $500,000-$1,000,000 on a property with a loan of 30 years.

This boom continued for nearly 2 years, and it was only in 2022, that we were able to purchase, a whole $250,000 more than we would have paid in 2019 for the same property. We weren’t in a position in 2019 to spend that sort of money due to a number of factors, and 2020 we weren’t sure where Sarah would be with her job and contracts.

The agent that told me to wait for the crash is no longer in real estate. A great guy and I love having a chat to him, but he left real estate a few years ago and is loving life again after returning to the previous career he was working in.

Now, if you’ve read my previous Ninja in a Blazer posts you’ll see that no “bust” period has dropped more than 8.6% and lasted no more than 25% of the length of the Boom period. If the Boom period was just under 2 years, then the bust period will be just under 6 months, and guess what… that bust period is coming to an end. PropTrack data shows home prices in Sydney have fallen for five successive months and are now (on average) cheaper than they were 12 months ago.

I’ve kept telling buyers to be patient, more properties are coming. Well, the properties are here, many are priced to sell, it’s time to get out and buy.