How this Sydney home’s value was slashed by $35,000 in just 14 months

A MASSIVE $35,000 was wiped off this Sydney home’s value in 14 short months. And some experts say it’s only getting worse.

13 Woodi Close, Glenmore Park lost $35,000 in value in 14 months. Picture: Mooney Real Estate

FOR months experts have warned of tumbling house prices in our biggest cities.

And now we have proof the house price crash has well and truly arrived.

When 13 Woodi Close in Glenmore Park sold in April 2017, the three-bedroom house fetched $670,000.

But when the owners were forced to sell the three-bedroom western Sydney home this June due to divorce, they pocketed just $635,000.

It means the family home’s original value plummeted by $35,000 or 5.22 per cent in 14 short months — even though it was in “the exact same condition”.

That’s according to Penrith sales agent and licensee Peggy Willcox of Mooney Real Estate, who said homes in the region had been dropping in value for most of 2018.

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“We tend to talk people out of selling where possible and instead rent the property out — it is really only in situations such as divorce or severe financial stress that they still sell,” Ms Willcox told news.com.au.

“The market is still quite unstable at the moment and the first homebuyer grant has had a huge impact.

“In Penrith we are seeing a large number of properties being sold for under $650,000, being the cut off for the full stamp duty exemption, and then a large gap in the market where there are few buyers in the $650,000 — $750,000 price bracket.

“The levels of stock are also increasing rapidly and I anticipate a large influx of properties in the next month. There are definitely bargains to be had.”

Ms Willcox said some sellers who refused to lower their price had “no hope” of finding a buyer at the moment.

“It has been pretty bad all year and it’s getting worse — as soon as we hit the spring selling season, we will have a lot more stock, with not many buyers,” she said.

“Buyers now have so much power. Last year it was very much a sellers’ market but I’d love to be buying at this point.”

However, property expert Matt Bateman said there was no cause for panic.

“Just because the median price for a city may be falling does not mean that the price of every property in that city is falling,” he said.

It’s a sentiment backed up by the latest CoreLogic Pain & Gain Report, which revealed almost nine out of 10 properties reselling in Australia were still making healthy profits, with the national increase in value of residential resales totalling around $15.683 billion.

But Mr Bateman said some suburbs were suffering from an “oversupply of certain property types”, which meant some vendors have had to adjust their price expectations to meet the market.

According to The Property Mentors Luke Harris (left) and Matthew Bateman (right), there is still no serious cause for alarm. Picture: Supplied

He said higher-end properties seemed to be posting the largest price corrections at this point in the cycle, and that CoreLogic data showed the biggest percentages of resale losses in the past year had been recorded in Sydney’s west and southwest, and in Melbourne’s CBD.

Starr Partners chief executive Doug Driscoll also called for calm.

“Is it property Armageddon? Absolutely not. Not long ago this is what most people probably wanted to see, a calming market, because prices had been going up too aggressively,” he said.

“Generally the economy is very robust in a global sense … so unless something comes out of left field I can’t really see the market crashing.

“But it’s not inconceivable it could soften further, plateau and then rise again because markets work in cycles. I can almost guarantee this downwards trajectory will be nowhere near as the trajectory upwards was.”

If you’re a first homebuyer hoping to find a “bargain” in Sydney as house prices continue to fall, forget it — because according to Mr Driscoll, there’s no such thing.

But he said it was still possible to find “remarkable value for money” in Sydney’s southwest corridor, which was still a “maturing” market which offered more “bang for your buck”.

He said first home buyers should consider buying into suburbs immediately next to an area they want to live in which is yet to be gentrified.

Starr Partners chief executive Doug Driscoll said there was still “no such thing” as a bargain in Sydney. Picture: Ian Svegovic

And he said it was also a good idea to consider long-term infrastructure projects likely to boost an area’s value.

However, other experts have previously predicted Australia’s property market was facing a crisis.

In a 60 Minutes episode which aired last month, data scientist Martin North from Digital Finance Analytics warned “at the worst end of the spectrum”, property prices could fall by 40-45 per cent from their peaks.

And NAB’s Quarterly Australian Residential Property Survey also found market sentiment among real estate agents had dipped to a seven-year low, as “confidence collapses” thanks to “weakening house prices in NSW and Victoria”.

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