Noticed something strange in the SA market

My wife and I are interested in getting a costal investment property in SA at some stage in the future. I started scraping data from domain a year ago, looking at the number of properties for sale from some costal regions, thinking that this might give me an idea of what the market is doing.

I noticed something strange over the past few days (or perhaps it seems strange because I am inexperienced in this area). In the basket of locations that I am calling the Fleurieu coast (Maslins Beach to Rapid Bay) there has been a huge increase (63% in 2 days) in properties listed for sale. Almost all of these are from a development in Aldinga selling land with unbuilt houses. At the same time there was a very large increase (31% in 2 days) in properties listed for sale along the coast from Encounter Bay to Goolwa (called Victor Goolwa in the graph). All of these new listings seem unrelated, no new developments, different locations and different real estate agents. It's like a whole lot of people suddenly decided sell between Encounter Bay and Goolwa. Could it be somehow related to a new financial year?

This seems really odd to me. I joined up here so that I might be able to get some input from people that have been watching these kind of things for a lot longer than I have. I would post this in 'Property Market Economics', but I think I have to get some posts in other places first.

 

I'm not going to pretend that I don't know anything about the area, but it could be an opportunity to buy (if that's your intention) If there's more property available than people wishing to purchase, you could lowball and get a good deal.....or.....maybe there's something going on in the area, of which the locals don't like, and so they want to get out.

Either way, you need to do more on the ground research, and not just look at the data to find out what's going on.

 

Thanks for the welcome. I had considered the possibility that either the Domain website or my scraping was doing something funny. But when I look at the individual properties, it says the date that the listing was added and that lines up with the graph. I guess it is possible that a council has redrawn a boundary, but I don't think that could explain it either.

 

Thanks for your comment. We weren't planning on buying at the moment, just waiting on the sidelines to get a better feel for how it all works before taking the plunge. I will have to look into the things you suggested.

 

It looks like I made a mistake. I was sure that the properties I was looking at yesterday were saying 'first listed 4 July' or 5 July were existing buildings, but now when I look again today, it is only new land with unbuilt houses. I guess I somehow made a mistake.

It looks like the same few companies involved in multiple developments. So nothing is particularly strange. When I've seen other new developments before it looked like they weren't all dumped on the market at once, but staggered over a longer period of time, but this is not as strange as I was thinking before.

 

A whole lot of these unbuilt houses sold yesterday with undisclosed prices. I don't really understand why you would bother advertising it if you already had buyers lined up to purchase. Perhaps it is to create a fear of missing out in other customers by them selling quickly. Clearly I have a lot more to learn about how the real estate market works.

Link to domain showing sales