• Global economic growth continues to slow as trade tensions between the United States and China continue to adversely impact business sentiment and confidence globally.
• While the Australian economy has moderated through 2019, given the signs of stabilisation in the housing markets, declining interest rates, ongoing spending on infrastructure, the domestic economy is projected to pick up in 2020.
• The Victorian housing market has made further progress towards a recovery, with consecutive dwelling value gains boosted by improving access to housing finance.
• Despite the vacancy rate of the Inner-City precinct well below 2%, constrained by tighter lending conditions for both developers and potential purchasers, new supply is projected to fall to five-year lows.
• Spurred by these 20-year low vacancy rates in the CBD and metropolitan office markets, speculative development has risen with a record high of new supply projected for the metropolitan office market in 2020.
• The scale of infrastructure projects currently under construction across the state, along with the difficulty of securing investment grade assets and depletion of industrial zoned land across the Melbourne metropolitan area resulted in industrial land values increasing to all-time highs.
• Although retail spending in Victoria continues to outperform other Australian states, reflecting the challenging discretionary spending sectors, investor and retailer sentiment is easing signalled by yields continuing to soften.

Copyright © 2019 by Urban Property Australia All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by microfilm, xerography, electronically or otherwise, or incorporated into any information retrieval system, without the written permission of the copyright owner.