Almost 1 million people inspected property located outside their home state in 2022, according to digital inspections platform, Little Hinges.
1 in 3 buyers around Australia inspected property outside the state they live in last year, according to an analysis of over 3 million digital inspections.
Little Hinges CMO, Mike York, said, “these figures, and the fact that they have remained consistent over the last 12 months, show that the way buyers inspect property has permanently changed, with an average of 27.1% of buyers digitally inspecting properties, sight unseen, outside of their home state.
“When paired with other trend reports that show that 58% of Australian buyers want a hybrid approach to inspecting properties (Zoom Qualtrics, 2021), the change in purchase behaviour is clear.
“Remote working, cost of living increases and a general sense of fatigue with the big cities following an uncertain two years has seen buyers, particularly from the southern states, look for sea and tree changes.
“This result has been particularly obvious in Queensland, with an average of 33% of all inspections coming from outside the state. On the Gold Coast, we are consistently seeing almost half of the inspections in the region coming from outside the state.
Queensland isn’t the only region to see an increase in the percentage of inspections being carried out from interstate over the last 12 months:
- Melbourne: Interstate inspections have increased from 13% in April 2022 to 20.4% in December 2022.
- Perth: Interstate inspections have increased from 16.3% in January to 20.4% in December.
- Sydney: NSW has seen the most variation, fluctuating between 8.5% in March to 13.9% in August. Sydney finished the year with a percentage of 11.9% of inspections coming from interstate.
“Buyers and tenants want to be able to inspect property in a way that works for them, and we’re continuing to see a strong uptick in agents and property managers wanting to combine virtual and physical inspections to open up their properties to the widest potential prospect base”, Mr York said.
Compared with the 6 month averages previously reported in the 2022 Jan – Jun Little Hinges Sight Unseen Report, almost all cities saw an increase in the percentage of inspections carried out from interstate. The only exception was Brisbane, which saw a marginal decrease.
Little Hinges analysed over 3,000,000 virtual inspections for their Jan – Dec Sight Unseen report released for the 12 months to December 2022.
