The coronavirus crisis certainly impacted the housing market throughout 2020, but towards the end of the year homes were selling and renting faster than they were at the end of 2019 in most states and territories.
The average number of days on site for properties that sold in December 2020 was 44 days compared to 51 days in December 2019, according to new data from realestate.com.au.
The average days on site typically spikes in January each year, but outside that period in 2020 the number reached a high of 71 days in June and has been trending lower ever since.
Days on site for properties sold in December 2020 was shortest in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Victoria, and longest in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland.
Properties listed in NSW, Victoria and the ACT have tended to sell faster than anywhere else in the country over the past several years, while properties in Queensland, WA and the NT have spent the longest time on the market.
While the time it takes to sell a home is likely to rise this month, the momentum seen over the second half of 2020 will likely continue for at least the first half of 2021.
The average number of days on market is expected to continue trending downwards in 2021. Picture: realestate.com.au/buy
While property sales are showing no signs of slowing down, days on site for rental properties has also dropped over the past year, down from an average of 25 days in December 2019 to 23 days in December 2020.
In this Blog, Pete Wargent looks at the latest unemployment figures.
An excellent labour force result in December with another +50,000 jobs added, mainly full time, taking total employment all the way back up to 12.9 million.
Job ads have been so strong lately that total employment i Australia could conceivably hit a record high in the first quarter of 2021.
HomeBuilder grant applications soar above expectations as buyers rush to build new homes
Reports show applications for the HomeBuilder grant are soaring.
This article from Domain.com.au looks at what’s going on.
Take up of the federal government’s HomeBuilder scheme has smashed expectations, with more than 75,000 households applying for the grants.
Sales of new houses nearly doubled in December compared to the previous month as buyers rushed to take advantage of the $25,000 grants before they ran out.
Up to $18 billion of residential construction projects will be supported by the scheme, on Treasury modelling, after it was announced in June to stimulate the construction industry.
As of December 31, some 59,763 applications had been made to build new homes, and 15,380 applications were for substantial renovations.
With the scheme designed as a temporary boost, then extended to March at a lower rate of $15,000, economists expect the recent surge in demand to ease.
The grants to build new or renovate are means tested and open to singles who earn up to $125,000 and couples who earn up to $200,000.
The biggest take-up of the construction grants was in Victoria, with 21,595 applications, followed by Queensland (16,613), New South Wales (13,687), Western Australia (11,924), South Australia (7,428), ACT (1,891), Tasmania (1,812) and the Northern Territory (193).
Housing Minister and Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar said supporting construction jobs and helping Australians buy a home were key priorities.
“HomeBuilder was designed immediately to inject confidence and encourage buyers back into the market to offset the devastating effects of the pandemic on the residential construction industry,” Mr Sukkar said.
“On all counts HomeBuilder has more than achieved this objective.”
Separate figures show sales of new houses skyrocketed by 91.8 per cent in December 2020 compared with November, as buyers jumped into the market before the $25,000 grants ended.
Sales jumped by 32.5 per cent across the 12 months of 2020 compared with 2019, shows the Housing Industry Association’s monthly New Home Sales report, which surveys the largest home building companies in Australia.
Australian home loan commitments soar to record-highs in late 2020
Home loan commitments are at a record high.
This article from 9news.com.au looks at the figures.
Australians are borrowing more money for property than ever before, new data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed today.
The total value of new loan commitments for housing reached a record high in November 2020, rising 5.6 per cent to $24 billion.
The value of new owner occupier home loan commitments – not investors but people buying to live – rose 5.5 per cent to $18.3 billion.
That’s almost a third higher than it was in November 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABS head of finance and wealth, Amanda Seneviratne, said most of the money was coming in for homes that already existed.
“Loan commitments for existing dwellings rose 5.9 per cent and were the largest contributor to the rise in November’s owner occupier housing loan commitments,” Ms Seneviratne said.
“The value of construction loan commitments grew 5.6 per cent in November, rising 75 per cent since July. This follows the implementation in June of the Government’s HomeBuilder grant in response to COVID-19.
“Other federal and state government incentives and ongoing low interest rates also contributed to the continuing growth in new housing loan commitments.”
The number of loan commitments for first home buyers rose 3.1 per cent to 13,905, marking a stratospheric rise of 42.5 per cent since the start of the year.
A huge spike in home loans marks a return to form for the Australian property market, which was remarkably resilient throughout the worst of the pandemic.
In fact, it appeared that the lack of availability to view and purchase homes merely paused ordinary trade until vendors, agents and buyers could begin working as normal.
“The number of residential property sales plummeted by 40 per cent through March and April but finished the year with almost 8 per cent more sales relative to a year ago as buyer numbers surged through the second half of the year,” Corelogic’s research director Tim Lawless said.
But that dreaded “F” word always pops up. Failure. This experience is strong enough to make you want to quit and start a new life.
It is no different for any entrepreneur. Or anyone trying to make something special out of their life. Whether it is getting ahead in your career or losing weight or taking items off of your bucket list.
You may fail many times you will fail before you are successful.
Ask just about anybody who has become successful if they have ever failed at any aspect of their journey. Chances are you will get quite a few stories of missteps and blunders.
The difference between long-term success and failure is the reaction to it.
People who, as Charlie Sheen said many years ago are “winners,” find a way to overcome the obstacles and persevere after failure.
It is not something that needs to be avoided. It is a chance to learn something that does not work!Failure is the mother of success.
It is not always reaching the destination that defines the man (or woman), but the journey that is taken to get there. The biggest successes have gone through the biggest failures.
If you are struggling in your life…or even if you’re looking for small business opportunities… don’t be afraid to try things that are “new” “different” and perhaps even fly in the face of conventional wisdom. The worst thing that can happen is failure… which is just a chance to learn and grow.
To illustrate the point, here is a list of 45 famous people who are/were successful, but…
…Experienced massive failure at one point in their lives.
Not only did these people fail, but they failed on a massive scale. Yet history still views these successful people who failedas great success stories because they bounced back and succeeded in the end.
So let’s talk about the specific setbacks that these individuals experienced.
1. Thomas Edison
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison
Chances are you have heard of Edison in relation to overcoming failure before. He was a master of trial and error. Someone who wasn’t afraid to make lots of mistakes in order to succeed.
When asked about the many thousands of failures he had when trying to create the light-bulb he famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
But there is even more to it than that. As a child, he was thought to be dumb and told that he would never be a success by many of his teachers because his mind would often wander in class.
Good thing for us that the greatest inventor in history did not listen.
2. Elvis Presley
When things go wrong, don’t go with them. – Elvis Presley
You do not need to be an Elvis fan to acknowledge the impact he has had on popular music. They don’t dub somebody the “King” of a form of music without a great amount of success.
But for Elvis success came after failure.
Elvis failed his music classes. He was a social misfit as a boy.
He was working as a truck driver while trying to get his recording career off the ground. After his first paying gig, his manager told him, “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.”
But Elvis persevered. His first recordings went nowhere. He tried to join a vocal quartet and was told he, “couldn’t sing”.
But finally, his music caught a groove, and after all that failure he ended up becoming one of the most popular recording artists in history.
3. Michael Jordan
It is hard to imagine it, but the Jordan, who is arguably the greatest basketball player ever, was once cut from his high school team.
He made the team at North Carolina and became a star college player. Then he played for the Bulls creating an armful of titles.
Then in the middle of his career, he took a few years off to try out his dream of becoming a professional baseball player. He ultimately failed in this effort to get to the major leagues but was able to have some good games in the minor league.
But even in basketball, where he is the GOAT. He got his success through hard work after failure. As Jordan puts it:
“I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game-winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
4. Vincent van Gogh
“What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything.” – Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh paintings these days sell for incredible amounts of money. Four of his paintings have sold for more than 100 million dollars.
Yet, Van Gogh is a cautionary tale. In his life, he was a failure.
He slowly began to build a “reputation” while he was alive, but he also had a ton of critics. He burned and destroyed many of his paintings out of frustration and was known to only sell ONE PAINTING.
He did not work to overcome his failure and killed himself. Soon after his death, his work began to garner intense critical and financial success.
5. Stephen King
It is my opinion that Steven King is the greatest living writer.
He is incredibly prolific. Having written over 60 novels. Many of which are quite long. He is popular. And at 72, his new releases almost always land at the top of the best-seller lists.
But King wasn’t born being a writer.
He wrote stories as a teenager and college student, collecting a huge backlog of rejected stories he stored in a large crate.
King was working as a teacher in rural Maine when he wrote his first novel, “Carrie”.
By this time King had some small success selling short stories previously, but nothing that anyone could build a career around.
Before his 31st attempt, he threw the manuscript out.
His wife rescued it from the round file and asked him to try one more time. The rest…is history.
6. Fred Astaire
“Do it big, do it right, do it with style.” – Fred Astaire
Many people consider Fred Astaire to be the greatest male dancer of all time. (Okay, ladies, I know…. Ginger Rogers did everything Fred did, but backward and in heels.)
Fred didn’t start out a success. But he did start early. He was six years old when he began working in a vaudeville act.
By the time he was in his mid-teens, he had some measure of success in vaudeville and began to work in Broadway and musicals. He wasn’t an instant success there either but slowly began to build a reputation and a degree of success.
Eventually, in his mid 30’s, he tried to get into the burgeoning movie industry.
During his first screen test, an RKO executive noted that Astaire, “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.”
Despite this initial rejection, Astaire persevered and ended up becoming one of the top actors, singers, and dancers of his generation.
Nearly 50 movies. Emmys, Grammys, an Oscar. By any measure, this balding guy, who couldn’t act, sing and could dance, “a little” became a huge success in film and dance.
7. Abraham Lincoln
If Lincoln had quit when the going got tough, the world might be a very different place.
As a young man Lincoln entered military service in the Black Hawk war as a captain. Yet left as a private.
With very little formal education, Lincoln taught himself and became a lawyer and congressman.
His real rise to national prominence could also be viewed as a “failure”. In 1858 Lincoln tried for a seat in the Illinois senate. This led to a series of hotly contested debates, known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Lincoln lost the senate election, but really impressed a lot of the right people, even with his loss. So he kept at the politics thing.
Two years later he ran for president and won.
Thankfully he did not let lack of formal education, a spotty career of failures, or initial political failure rattle him, and he went on to become one of our greatest presidents.
8. JK Rowling
Rowling is the perfect example that success can come to anyone at any time.
She is now doing the backstroke through a pool of Harry Potter money, but that was not always the case.
Rowling always planned on being a writer. But life interfered.
She battled depression over the untimely death of her mother. Her first marriage failed and she was left trying to provide for herself and raise a young child alone while living on welfare, going to school and trying to work on a novel in her nonexistent spare time.
Rowling herself said she was the “biggest failure I knew” and credits a lot of her success to her failure.
Before Harry Potter became a success she was a divorced mother, living on welfare, going to school and trying to write a novel in her spare time.
At a Harvard commencement speech, Rowling had this to say about failure:
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
9. Albert Einstein
If asked to name a genius, most people would come up with the name Albert Einstein. Yet even for Einstein genius did not come easy. He had speech difficulties as a child and was once even thought to be mentally handicapped.
As a teen he rebelled against his school’s reliance on rote learning and failed.
He tried to test into Zurich Polytechnic, but failed again (although he did very well in the math and physics section…as you might expect).
Einstein buckled down, received the requisite training and applied to Zurich Polytechnic again, and of course, was accepted.
A few years later he had a Ph.D. and was recognized as a leading theorist. A few years after that he had a Nobel prize for physics and began to be recognized as the genius of our modern era.
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. “- Albert Einstein
10. Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss)
When you were a child, you probably read Green Eggs and Hamand The Cat in the Hat, as well as other books written by Geisel under his pen name, Dr. Seuss. To date, over 600 million copies of his books have been sold all over the world.
Many would think that this kind of success means that all sorts of doors of opportunity were opened for Dr. Seuss. However, his first book, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Tree, almost did not get published.
Mulberry Street was rejected 27 times, and Dr. Seuss decided to head home to burn the book’s manuscript. However, at the last minute a break came, paving the way for publication and a glowing review that transformed his first book from a candidate for the garbage bin to an instant bestseller. This ultimately paved the way for the success of his other books.
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