Ray White Western Australia Has its Best January Result Ever!

That’s a big headline. The 2006 / 2007 boom was unprecedented, but January 2013 was bigger than either of those two January’s in Western Australia. Why? What could it mean?

Let’s not jump to too many conclusions and get carried away, but it should give everyone in the company confidence that the market has lifted.

$143 million in unconditional sales volume was the final number from 315 sales, 493 written offers, 863 appraisals, 489 new listings of which 16 were auctions.

January is often the holiday month when no one is around and the reported unconditional sales volumes falls away. That clearly wasn’t the case this January and begs the question how big will the rest of the year be?

Positive sentiment in most economic circles including the share market, employment markets, migration rates, even retail spending has been more positive in recent months which all builds confidence in the marketplace and promotes the “buy now”, “invest now” sentiment in buyers.

These positive sentiments often lead the Reserve Bank to look at raising interest rates to keep this positivity in check. One problem. The major markets of Victoria and New South Wales (Queensland to a lesser extent) are all slowing and trending either down or flattening out. So it is quite possible that interest rates will remain steady in the short to medium term.

The last time this set of circumstances all lined up we had an unprecedented boom. Either way we will need more listings and encouragingly the group still managed to list 174 more properties than we sold.

The most encouraging factor comes from the evenness of the results across our businesses.