Prahran joins million dollar club in Victoria: Melbourne auction preview

According to CoreLogic RP Data, Melbourne now has 52 suburbs with a median house value in excess of $1 million – the data covers the 12 months ending in September.

Melbourne’s most expensive suburb remains Toorak, with a median house value of $2.92 million. The median sale price, which reflects the prices paid over the last year has for the first time, exceeded $3 million. This indicates a slightly more expensive segment of Toorak has been selling over the last year.

Toorak will clearly be the city’s first $3 million dollar suburb, its just a matter of when.

There are three other suburbs with medians in excess of two million: Deepdene, Canterbury and Kooyong.

From sales volumes perspective, the highest was in Brighton followed by Balwyn North, Kew, Glen Iris and Camberwell.

Putting aside the cost, the million dollar suburb that proved the easiest to buy into was Deepdene were 14% of houses sold in the last year. In contrast Fairfield was a tightly held suburb with only 2.8% of houses selling.

Two new suburbs in the list are Prahran and Williamstown. The median value of a house in Williamstown – the second suburb in the west to reach this level was $1,002,000. Prahran’s median for a house is now $1 million.

There are 565 auctions scheduled this week in Melbourne compared to 531 for the same time last year. This is the last week for the year in which there are expected to be a substantial volume of auctions. Until early February next year there will be a small number of auctions weekly, mostly outside of the metropolitan area.

With one week to go this year the auction market has seen more homes sold by more people. The clearance rate for 2014 is likely to be marginally lower, around 68.6%, than 2013 when it was 69.2%. With one week to go there have been 43,298 auctions held, 17.8% more than last year and 29,632 homes selling.

Weeks with over 1,000 auctions used to be a rarity, but with 22 occurring this year they are now a regular feature of the market.

In the private sale market conditions continue to be healthy for sellers. On a citywide basis, the time on market results for houses sold at private sale was stable at 31 days over the last week and vendor discounting was also stable at -5%.

Key data

• Clearance rate week ending 14 December: 68.6%
• Melbourne auctions expected week ending 21 December: 565
• Melbourne private sales time on market week ending 14 December: 31 days (houses)
• Melbourne vendor discounting market week ending 14 December: -5% (houses)
• Listings being prepared for market are 1.3% lower in month ending 14 December (seasonally adjusted)

Photo of Chapel Street, Prahran courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.