Mosman busy, but first home buyers absent

FIRST home buyers are still missing from the property market, but rising from its recent mire of inactivity two $15 million Mosman sales have been secured in the past fortnight.

The top-end sales were both for non-waterfront residences overlooking Balmoral Beach.

A Stanley Avenue house with classical Palladian-style architecture sold for $15.25 million at the end of last month.

And this week word emerged of the near $15 million sale of a Federation house on Kirkoswald Avenue. ”Quite often when the economy slows the words caution and collapse become confused,” a Mosman agent, Robert Simeon, said.

The previous record for a non-waterfront home was $13.2 million last year.

“The five-bedroom, eight-bathroom, Stanley Avenue family home with tennis court and heated 20-metre lap pool is one of the finest non-waterfront properties in the area,” its selling agent, Raine and Horne’s Brendan Warner, said.

”We still have three or four good buyers with a budget of $20 million or so to spend on the right property,” he said.

One agent said Mosman had been paying the price for having too many merchant bankers in residence.

”However, depending on the urgency of the vendor, prices can still be quite resilient,” he said.

The decision by the Reserve Bank to keep official interest rates unchanged at 4.75 per cent following its monthly board meeting suggested rates would remain on hold for the time being, RP Data’s research director, Tim Lawless, said.

In February, first home buyer numbers across NSW slipped to the lowest level since the government assistance scheme began in 2000. There were 2272 first home grants that month, down from 2799 in February last year.

The record February was 4302 grants in 2009.

There are about 500 auctions scheduled for this weekend, according to Australian Property Monitors, with Turramurra the busiest suburb.

The pre-Easter rush has triggered about 670 auctions next Saturday.