6 stories
Melbourne enters spring with the deepest pool of stock of any capital city. Agents report vendors are pricing to meet the market rather than testing it, keeping clearance rates stable even as choice widens.
Builders are declining work that would have been taken without hesitation five years ago. Fixed-price contracts, insolvency risk and a thin subcontractor market are converting a planning problem into a delivery problem.
Melbourne has spent four years underperforming the national index. The reasons are structural rather than cyclical, and they explain why rate cuts have had less effect here than anywhere else.
A data analysis of 1,240 suburbs identifies where the house-apartment relationship has inverted, and what those markets have in common.
The sector has moved from pilot to fixture, and is now large enough to influence advertised rents in the inner city.
The study finds that identical apartment layouts cost between 4 and 13 per cent more to deliver depending on the state in which they are built.