April is a very unusual month for property and I get the feeling this year will be no exception. After a cracker of a start to the year and, by all accounts, a record breaking month in March, it kind of ends.
In April the property market has a bad habit of suddenly stopping. It doesn’t ease off or fall away, it quite literally dries up. Overnight. Which of course means people start to panic.
But wait just a moment. It’s not that the market has imploded, it’s simply April. That’s what happens in April. It isn’t the start of a downturn it’s actually just a pause.
Think about it. In the month of April there is Easter, school holidays, ANZAC day, the end of daylight saving, the start of Winter sports and often the start of the cooler weather.
Those things all take time and they take some getting used to. Combined, they result in focus moving away from property until everything and everyone settles down into a new routine.
But it is only temporary so there is no need to panic. Even as the weather continues to cool once April is behind us the property market will heat up again just as quickly as it cooled. And as I have said before we no longer see a dramatic drop off in activity over Winter because increasingly buyers are savvy to the opportunities of buying out of the peak shoulder seasons.
So if you read reports with headlines claiming the market is in trouble don’t despair. We have a great number of listings scheduled to come online over the next few months and buyers ready to act. They just needed a break to cope with everything going on in April!