Melbourne auctions: Buyers flock from east to west to find cheaper homes

A young couple will ditch the eastern suburbs for the city’s inner west after they nabbed a stunning period house in Yarraville on Saturday.

It’s becoming an all-too familiar tale as upsizing buyers from the east cast their gaze across the city in search of cheaper digs.

The three-bedroom, two-bathroom home was one of about 1306 properties scheduled to go under the hammer in Melbourne on Saturday, for the first weekend of the autumn selling season. By evening, Domain Group had recorded a clearance rate of 65.7 per cent from 989 reported results. 

Tap here for Saturday’s auction results.

Tap here for the Market Snapshot.

There was no sign of a cool change though with temperatures hitting 31 degrees during the auction of 101 Gamon Street.

The renovated, single-fronted house had been inspected by 115 groups throughout the sale campaign, but it came down to a two-horse race at auction.

Two couples – from Port Melbourne and Hawthorn – quickly pushed bidding from $1.25 million to $1.35 million, when the house was declared on the market.

It went on to sell to the young couple from Hawthorn for $1,389,000 in front of a crowd of about 30 people.

“We own an apartment and we were looking to upsize and the west stood out because it had some homes with character that we couldn’t afford [if they were] in Hawthorn,” said the buyers, who wished to remain anonymous. “We fell in love with the inner west.”

Standing in the crowd as the auction unfolded was vendor Matt Smith, who bought the Yarraville property with his wife nine years ago. Records show it traded for $470,000.

Back then, it was an unrenovated two-bedroom house. “It was a mess,” Mr Smith said. “[But] it was a good buy when we bought it.”

The couple renovated and extended, living in the house for seven years before they rented it out and bought in Newport.

Mr Smith said Yarraville was attracting new residents to the area. “I think people from the east are, sort of, discovering it,” he said.

“If you grew up here, you always knew you had the Sun Theatre, you had the village, you had Seddon.”

Auctioneer and listing agent Tristan Tomasino, from Biggin & Scott, said waves of buyers living in one or two-bedroom apartments in the inner east were flocking to the inner west.

“For period homes, that’s a huge trend at the moment,” he said, adding people wanted better value for money in return.

Mr Tomasino believed the auction market had improved since the end of last year.

“In spring, the market softened and clearance rates dropped by 10 per cent but it’s bounced back,” he said.

“The trend that I’ve noticed recently over the last three weeks is even though properties are passing in, most of the agents are selling them that day.”

More properties were also selling before auction, Mr Tomasino observed, before adding there was an oversupply in the inner west.

“March is going to be a huge auction month. It’s probably going to be one of the biggest of the year.”

Elsewhere in the western suburbs, a suite of properties passed in on Saturday.

A three-bedroom, two-bathroom family house in Somerset Drive in Sunshine North failed to secure a buyer. It had been listed with an advertised price guide of $580,000 to $630,000.

In Sunshine, a Californian bungalow on a 615-square-metre block didn’t attract any bidders when it went to auction with price hopes above $1.1 million.

And in Brooklyn, a four-bedroom brick veneer house on more than 700 square metres also passed in. It had an advertised price range between $995,000 and $1,090,000, well over the suburb’s median house price of $659,000.