IT’S the quick and the disappointed for house hunters in Melbourne’s outer east.
There are five suburbs in which private treaty sales are faster than the four-week auction market of Melbourne’s inner suburbs.
Houses in Kilsyth South are lasting an average 16 days before they are snapped up.
Meanwhile, buyers in The Basin and Scoresby have just 22 and 23 days on average to have their offer accepted. There are eight suburbs across the city’s outer east where units and houses sell within a month, on average.
Harcourts Boronia director John Garnett said homeowners across the area had to ask buyers to wait for the Section 32 to be completed. They didn’t bother with auctions because they were too slow.
“If we do an auction, we will do it inside of three or four weeks,” Mr Garnett said.
Kristy Amos recently sold her unit in Ferntree Gully in just 20 days.
“We had a lot of interest as soon as it hit the internet,” Ms Amos said. “It was 20 days from when it was listed, but we held back on the sale because we had three people wanting to put offers in.”
Across Melbourne, the time it takes to sell a house by private treaty has fallen, according to RP Data senior analyst Cameron Kusher.
“What we are generally finding is across the capital cities you are seeing a decline in how long it takes to sell a property and that reflects the sales activity we have seen and obviously the growth in values that we have seen,” he said.
However, two of Melbourne’s ritziest postcodes have emerged as among its hardest to sell.
Homeowners in Toorak and East Melbourne, where median house prices are $2.8 million and $1.9 million respectively, have to wait a third of the year on average to find a buyer, according to RP Data figures for private sales.
Houses in well-heeled East Melbourne take an average 137 days to sell, while in Toorak the average house spends 118 days on the market.