Sydney's Northern Beaches riding wave of interest

Positive trends in the Sydney property market are particularly strong in the Northern Beaches area, where ocean view real estate and high net worth neighbours have seen dwelling prices double in the past decade.

Ray White NSW state auctioneer Perry Edmondson-Clark said there was strong bidding and clearance rate data from all segments of the Sydney property market last weekend, with first home buyers and investors out in force fighting for apartments, and strong activity and confidence from buyers at house auctions, including on the Northern Beaches.

“We continue to see momentum in the market, snowballing into what we expect will be a phenomenal end to the 2023 auction calendar,” Mr Edmondson-Clark said.

A 557m2 block with a three-bedroom, one bath, one garage house in the Northern Beaches suburb of Seaforth is an indication of the snowball gathering momentum. The Koobilya Street property was sold through Ray White Seaforth on Friday (22 July) for $2.6 million dollars, $250,000 over reserve.

Lead agent Mark Griffiths said bidding started at $2 million with about 33 bids in total.

“The market is pretty hot and at that price point it was hotly contested as there’s not much stock available, there’s only about 18 properties on the market in Seaforth at the moment, which means there’s even less properties at each price point.”

The seller had owned and lived in the home for 55 years and was downsizing while the successful bidder was a family with two children intending to live in the house while building their dream home.

Source: Corelogic.

The median price for three-bedroom houses in Seaforth is currently $2.45 million, which according to realestate.com.au is down 18.5 per cent in the past 12 months, while the median price to buy a unit in Seaforth is $1.5 million, down 17.9 per cent over the past year.

The Northern Beaches auction statistics released on Sunday (24 July) by CoreLogic show the region’s clearance rate to be 76.9 per cent, with a total of 44 auctions and 30 cleared.

Breaking a record for the suburb, a high-profile auction included in those figures is the architecturally designed, 670m2 property at 6 Adina Road, Curl Curl, a five-bedroom, three-bathroom, two car space house, 60 metres from the beach, which sold on Friday through Smyth Estate Agents for $6.6 million.

In 2011, the property sold for $3,025,000 and in 2003, $1,320,000 with the newest owner reportedly a New York expat banker returning to Australia.

The Northern Beaches clearance rates are slightly higher than Sydney’s overall in the past week when 699 auctions were held and the clearance rate was 74.2 per cent (535 collected), which is also up on the same time last year when it was 50.8 per cent for 674 auctions listed but down 70 basis points from the week prior.

Most expensive Sydney suburbs to rent

Sydney’s gross rental yields fell 3.1 per cent across the city but it remains the country’s most expensive rental capital for all property types with the typical dwelling renting for $733 p/w, the typical house renting for $778 p/w and the typical unit renting for $688 p/w, according to CoreLogic’s Quarterly Rental Review July.

Nine Northern Beaches suburbs are listed in the Review’s top 30 most expensive suburbs in which to rent houses, including Balgowlah Heights, Clontarf, Fairlight, Curl Curl, Balgowlah, Collaroy, North Curl Curl, Freshwater and Bayview.

Of these suburbs, Balgowlah Heights was listed fourth, where median house values are $4.3 million, gross rental yield is 2.5 per cent, and median rent is $2,026, which indicates a quarterly change of 1.1 per cent, annual change of 14.4 per cent and vacancy rate of 2.6 per cent.

Trent Docherty, Head of Property Management, Cunninghams, a Northern Beaches real estate agency with branches in Balgowlah, Avalon Beach, Manly, and Collaroy, said the Northern Beaches rental market had been good in the last six months.

“We have seen that our market here on the Northern beaches, which I consider to be a micro market, has performed well and it has consistently performed throughout the year, and earlier this month we had 18 open homes and an average of 2.9 people through each open home, so obviously some open homes had more people than that through and some had less, but it seems to me the most popular or the busiest open homes would be the two bedroom apartments.

“Dee Why is performing especially well in the $650 to $700 a week range, and we had one there that had 13 groups through it,” Mr Docherty said.

“We are quite seasonal here on the Northern Beaches so when people are walking around in bikinis with surfboards under their arms, that’s when the Northern Beaches really performs so I would say traditionally, September is when that starts to happen, and the best months we’ve had for leasing in the past have been October, November, where you’ll see stock shortened slightly and the demand will pick up - that’s how it works.”

Realestate.com.au first home buyer and investor hotspot data sourced by PropTrack ranks the Northern Beaches in the top 10 SA4 regions with the highest year-on-year growth in email enquiries.

First home buyer interest in the Northern Beaches is up 17 per cent behind West and North West Sydney (20 per cent), Geelong (20), Riverina (21), Perth Inner (22) and Brisbane West (24 per cent), while investor interest is up 25 per cent.