The REIT’s March 2023 Quarterly Report provided confirmation the state’s real estate market has slowed under the weight of increasing interest rates.
According to the report, the number of real estate transactions in the opening three months of the year are down 26.6 per cent on the equivalent period last year.
Additional declines were recorded in Tasmania’s median house price (1.8 per cent), first home buyer numbers (9.6 per cent), investor numbers (59.9 per cent), mainland purchaser acquisitions (52.7 per cent), the number of million-dollar sales (34.9 per cent), and the total value of property sales, which fell 24.7 per cent to $1.26 billion in 2023’s opening quarter.
In positive news for state-based investors, unit and land prices rose 3.1 per cent and 11.7 per cent, respectively.
Across the opening quarter of the year, 2,090 sales went down in Tasmania, with almost 1,500 being homes (down 20.8 per cent), while a decline in unit sales from 387 in the opening quarter of last year to the same period in 2023 wasn’t enough to reduce median price of the dwelling group, which climbed $15,000 to $500,000.
Indicative of how rising interest rates and cost of living have impacted consumer sentiment, the average time on market for a Tasmanian property has doubled in the last 12 months to 42 days for houses and 41 days for units, highlighting the shift in market dynamics away from sellers.
On the rental front, vacancy rates eased as the number of available rental properties increased, a trend ratified by recent data from SQM Research, which found the state capital, Hobart’s, vacancy rate rose to 1.6 per cent in April, potentially hinting at the end of the state’s rental crisis.
However, the REIT noted, “very few of these properties fall within the lower