|
||||||||
|
David’s Take · Weekly Letter
The Buyers Haven’t Changed.Their fear has. |
||||||||
| Dear Readers, | ||||||||
| Over the past few years I’ve noticed something. The buyers haven’t changed. Their fear has. | ||||||||
| Back in 2021, buyers were afraid of missing out. Today, they’re afraid of overpaying. That one change explains almost everything we’re seeing in the market. | ||||||||
| Why some homes sell before auction while others sit for months, why buyers inspect ten homes before making an offer, why one property draws multiple offers and the next struggles to attract a second inspection. | ||||||||
| The market hasn’t stopped. | ||||||||
| The psychology has. | ||||||||
| Every weekend we’re still seeing genuine buyer activity across the Lower North Shore. Open homes continue to attract qualified purchasers, inspections are taking place, offers are being made and homes are still selling. Buyers haven’t disappeared. | ||||||||
| They’ve simply become far more selective. | ||||||||
| Finance is still available. People are still relocating for work, upsizing for growing families, downsizing after the children leave home and moving because life circumstances change. The demand is still there. | ||||||||
| What’s disappeared is the willingness to overpay. | ||||||||
| Today’s buyers do their homework before making an offer. They compare recent sales, study competing properties and calculate replacement costs. | ||||||||
| That’s exactly why we’ve changed the way we prepare our appraisals. Every property is now assessed using a comparable analysis alongside traditional valuation methods. Before we recommend a price, we want to understand exactly what today’s buyers are likely to conclude when they analyse the same evidence. | ||||||||
| Evidence wins. Opinion doesn’t. | ||||||||
| When buyers believe a property is fairly priced, they move surprisingly quickly. That’s why we’ve seen so many homes sell before auction this year. Those vendors didn’t necessarily own the best homes, they gave buyers confidence. | ||||||||
| And confidence comes from evidence. | ||||||||
| When buyers perceive a property is overpriced, they rarely negotiate. | ||||||||
| They simply move on to the next property. | ||||||||
| Every week a home remains unsold, the question in the buyer’s mind quietly changes from: | ||||||||
|
“Is this the right home?”
to
“What’s wrong with it?”
|
||||||||
| Whether that’s fair or not doesn’t really matter. | ||||||||
| Perception quickly becomes reality. | ||||||||
| We’ve seen it across the Lower North Shore this year. Good homes have been reduced in price or withdrawn from the market because there wasn’t anything wrong with them, but because buyers never believed the original asking price represented value. | ||||||||
|
What This Means for Sellers
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
| Success today isn’t about finding one optimistic buyer. | ||||||||
| It’s about removing uncertainty. | ||||||||
| Price a home in line with the evidence and buyers become remarkably decisive. | ||||||||
| Price above the evidence and they become remarkably patient. | ||||||||
|
||||||||
|
David’s Take
The market is telling two stories right now, and both are in the data.
Story one:
Correctly priced property is still selling on schedule. This week’s sales went under contract in a median of 29 days, and the year-to-date median sale price sits at $3,965,000 — it hasn’t moved more than 1% all winter. The buyers are there, and they’re paying fair value for the right home.
Story two:
The stock that hasn’t sold is ageing fast. Median days on market for current listings has more than doubled since the start of June — 38 days to 80. Same market, same suburbs. The difference is the asking price.
This week 7 listings adjusted down against 4 up, and that ratio has run negative every single week for two months. The market corrects overpricing; it just does it slowly and expensively.
Meanwhile, supply is tightening. There are 187 homes on the market today, down from 270 at the start of June — a 31% drop — with only 15 fresh listings this week. If you’re a vendor ready to go, you’re facing the least competition we’ve seen all year.
And the auction picture has shifted. In early June, 4 in 10 local listings were auction-bound; it’s now fewer than 1 in 4. Sydney-wide clearance is running around 49%, against 69% this time last year. Auctions still work for A-grade homes — but campaigns are being won in the negotiation before and after auction day, not under the hammer.
Bottom line: this isn’t a falling market — the sold median is rock steady. It’s an honest one. Price on the evidence and you’re sold inside a month. Price on hope and you become the 80-day statistic.
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Lower North Shore Market Reports — Download Free
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Explore The Area
Northbridge Interactive Map
→ Click to Explore the Interactive Map
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
Lower North Shore
140 Sailors Bay Road, Northbridge NSW 2063
Sources: Team Howe market data, week ending 20 July 2026. Figures are houses only, Lower North Shore. Provided in good faith and may have changed since publication. Interested parties should make their own independent enquiries before relying on any information herein.
© Raine & Horne Lower North Shore. You are receiving this because you have previously been in touch with our office about Lower North Shore property. |
||||||||
