The Big Spring Squeeze.
Spring is ready to bloom - so where is everyone?
There is a particular kind of property-market logic that appears whenever confidence gets shaky: buyers decide they should wait for prices to fall, sellers decide they should wait for prices to rise, and everybody ends up staring at one another across an increasingly empty marketplace, wondering who is supposed to move first. That, in broad terms, is where parts of Melbourne’s property market find themselves this spring.
Listing volumes remain unusually thin across Stonnington, Port Phillip and Glen Eira, and the traditional spring rush has been slower to materialise than many expected. From the outside, that can easily be read as weakness. However, those in the inner circles aren’t describing a market without demand; instead, they’re noting it’s being starved of stock.
Marshall White Stonnington Director Marcus Chiminello says the balance has shifted markedly since the beginning of the year. “Buyers are ready to execute their plans, while vendors are withholding theirs,” he says. Many sellers are instead choosing to remain off-market, effectively “passively seeking” a buyer while they wait for greater certainty.
For some, that certainty is tied to November’s Victorian election, but Chiminello is wary of treating a change of government as a cure-all. “I think too many people firmly believe that a change of government will be the silver bullet,” he says. His concern is that owners who postpone selling until February or March could return with a much larger wave of stock, creating the competition they are currently avoiding.
His advice is therefore less about trying to pick the perfect moment and more about understanding the market in front of you. “Be informed about the value of your home and informed about the availability of other properties, then move forward with confidence.” As he puts it, “Confidence needs to be built. Urgency doesn’t.”
Across Port Phillip and Glen Eira, Ben Manolitsas and Rowan Bustin are seeing much the same imbalance from the seller’s side: fewer listings can be inconvenient for buyers, but they can be extremely useful for the owners who decide not to join the waiting game. Manolitsas’ Marshall White Albert Park team sold 11 properties during August, while 32 prospective buyers contacted them in a single week asking what was available or coming next. “There is not enough supply, and there is absolutely demand,” he says. “The lack of stock is fuelling competition.”
Rowan Bustin, Director of RT Edgar Glen Eira, reaches a similar conclusion. “There are still genuine buyers out there, but they have fewer properties to choose from,” he says. “If you’ve got a great home and it’s presented and priced well, coming to market while stock is tight can give you a real advantage.”
This is where the collective reluctance to sell becomes slightly self-defeating. Waiting until confidence has returned sounds perfectly sensible until you remember that plenty of other homeowners are waiting for exactly the same thing. If they all regain confidence at once, the seller who had little competition in September may find considerably more by February 2027.
For Manolitsas, pre-market has become one way of removing some of that guesswork. Rather than launching publicly and hoping the price aligns, his team can take a home to qualified buyers first, assess genuine interest and let actual behaviour do some of the talking. It is less romantic than trying to “time the market”, perhaps, but probably rather more useful.
The finance side adds another layer. Award-winning Zimlend founder Angelique Tallon says first-home buyers remain highly active and, in some cases, are purchasing before formal pre-approval is even complete. Perhaps more tellingly, the question that dominated property conversations for several years has gone strangely quiet. “I don’t think I’ve had one person ask about what is happening with rates,” she says. The greater frustration, in many cases, is finding something they actually want to buy.
Tallon does draw an important distinction between segments, with particularly strong activity below $800,000 and a noticeable reduction above $1 million. Melbourne, as ever, is not one market, no matter how often it is squeezed into a single headline and asked to behave like one.
That, really, is the opportunity sitting underneath the current spring season. No, Melbourne has not returned to the peak conditions of 2021, and nobody credible should pretend it has. Buyers are more selective, sellers are more conscious of value, presentation matters more and even the good agents have to work considerably harder. But none of that automatically adds up to a bad market.
For homeowners waiting until everybody else feels confident enough to sell, there is one fairly obvious problem with the strategy: everybody else might have exactly the same idea.