Anthony Landahl

Yeah, good morning.

Great to be here on this Saturday.

And look, I think Eve's email is fairly reflective of a lot of people at the moment taking a cautious approach.

It's a challenging environment for buyers, for sellers and for existing mortgage holders.

I think your last point was well made around really taking a long-term approach, understanding you do get oscillations in the market over time and just making sure you're cautious but comfortable about what you're doing.

Yeah, look, I think for first home buyers, particularly if they're buying up to 95% of the value of the property, if they're at their maximum capacity, if they've only got 5% equity to start with using some of the government programs, that there might be a bit of caution coming in from the parents.

If we do get a dip in market, they might be in a negative equity position, rates go up, repayments go up.

A little bit of caution makes sense, but obviously with a bit of a market cooling becomes opportunity as well.

So it's a bit of a double-edged

Yeah, look, we are seeing a lot of clients, I guess, take a more cautionary approach in terms of that it's really making them re-understand what they're able to do and factor in potential interest rate changes, as well as inflationary pressures, obviously, with the increase in the oil prices flowing through to petrol.

We're also getting some fears coming through.

Westpac, for example, said there might be three more cash rate increases.

Inflation might peak at over 5%.

So I think there's a lot of sentiment flowing through the market that reflects that sort of uncertainty around how high will inflation get?

How many more rate increases will we get?

Do I just sit the market out for six months, focus on my deposit, focus on my savings and come back at it

maybe in six to 12 months once there's a little bit more certainty.

So it's not an uncommon picture.

We're also seeing some sellers take their property off the market as well, just to wait until things have settled down a little bit.

Across the market, there's uncertainty, but the big thing we're telling our clients is just understand what you can do, adjust your scope, and then quietly go about making informed and sensible decisions.