Melbourne a better market for aspiring buyers than investors: Monique Sasson Wakelin

The current Melbourne housing market dynamics are working in the favour of aspiring home owners, with no short-term prospect of capital growth for investors, says property investment adviser Monique Sasson Wakelin.

Monique Sasson Wakelin advised June 28 that she actually said: “We will have relatively little if any capital growth in the property market probably for the next 12 months or so.”

However, she says the good news is that with Melbourne house prices down more than 8.4% over the 12 months to the end May (according to RP Data) and interest rates falling, affordability has improved, meaning aspiring buyers can get a foothold in the market.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it – you can’t have fabulous capital growth as an investor and high affordability as an aspiring home buyer.

“Take your pick. You will have one or the other at any given point in time.

“Investors will be treading water for some time, but the upside is that you are coming into a market that is very transparent and very affordable.

“It’s a question of balance, of weighing up the options,” she told ABC Radio.

However, Wakelin insisted a lack of capital growth did not mean the “sky is falling in” or that the “everything is going to fall apart”.

Her latest comments do though represent quite a shift from more upbeat comments made a month ago.

In May she said the market was in “recovery mode”, with a perceptible shift in power from buyers to vendors.

In the interview she also said the current state of the market does not mean “sky is falling in and we’re all about to fall into the doom”

“We are not, the reality is if we look back a couple of years, we were all screaming black and blue that affordability was through the floor and nobody could get finance, let alone afford to buy anything reasonable in Melbourne, even in the outer suburbs. It was just horrendously difficult for anything,” she says.

“So the good news is that with lower interest rates and higher affordability we have a far better chance for those who want to get into the market, for whatever purpose be it for home buying or investment, now is the time they will be able to do that in a relatively affordable fashion,” she says.