How has the Ballarat residential property performed through the 2020 covid-19 pandemic?

Ballarat is a major Victorian regional city, just over 100 kms north-west of the state capital Melbourne. Jarrod McCabe, director, Wakelin Property Advisory, interviews Tim Valpied, director, Jellis Craig Ballarat, as part of the Rewarding Property Decisions series, about the nature of the city's residential property market and its performance since the start of the covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

Transcript, abridged:

- Hi everyone. My name is Jarrod McCabe So the idea of our new video series is going to be to provide viewers with insights into different investment strategies and ways you can go about things. Now, obviously, given that we're a property company, the bulk of it will be focused on property investment. However, along the way, I'm hoping to certainly speak to people who look at investing in different asset classes as well. But I thought today we'd start off in regional Victoria, and more specifically in Ballarat, given that Melbourne is currently still in stage 4 lockdown, and the market is very much in hibernation mode at the moment. If you go to the regional cities like Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong, there's still quite a bit of activity occurring. And with a lot of discussions around remote working at the present time, it's driving a lot of people to consider both tree and sea change. So Ballarat is a good option from that perspective. But also when you start to look at affordability of living, there's certainly good opportunities there. So I'm joined today by Tim Valpied. Tim is a veteran of the Ballarat real estate market. He's very highly regarded and well respected with over 30 years experience. And he's currently a director at Jellis Craig. Welcome, Tim, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks Jarrod. Good to be here. Tim and I have got a long history. I actually did work experience with Tim when I was still in high school. Certainly it was a big driver of me getting into the property market. So Tim, can you tell us a bit just, I guess, to start with one of the obvious questions around how the Ballarat market has performed since the start of this year, obviously with the market generally opening fairly well off the back of a strong finish to 2019, but then obviously with the first and second waves of COVID, how's that impacted Ballarat? Well, to suggest it's been an interesting year would be an understatement, but basically the beginning of the year we started very, very strongly. There was fantastic interest, particularly the last 10 years, but the last five years in particular the interest from people changing for we call it a tree change here has been growing year on year to approximately 50 or just a bit over 50% of our transactions come from Melbourne. In that respect, it's been growing year on year. Then obviously COVID hit and we sort of in our office, March and April you would have thought that someone had turned the Internet off and our phones, and really, Ballarat market hit the skids. In relation to I guess the recovery from there though, May turned around to a degree. And then June, July, August, back to back we've had three very strong months. And talking to some of our colleagues in Melbourne, obviously a very different scenario. But having said that, a lot of the activity of recent times has been off the back of local inquiry, but the recovery has been... July and August is as good as pre-COVID, so it's been quite, quite strong.

Видео How has the Ballarat residential property performed through the 2020 covid-19 pandemic? канала Wakelin Property Advisory