During the financial year 2022, Lucas Real Estate sold a record number of properties and our landlords have welcomed a rental recovery. From a sales point of view, we sold 203 properties, up from 169 last financial year—a phenomenal effort. Our team has had a real focus on service. Not just for our vendors and landlords but also our buyers and tenants, ensuring that we're in contact with people enquiring on properties, providing the right advice along the way (our new buyer tips video series is launching soon), and it's paid dividends. We look forward to taking our focus on the customer and client to another level next year.
What drove such an improvement in sales volume? From a market point of view, it comes down to two things that are very much linked - affordability and value for money. With the housing market in a price bubble, the apartment market has been very stable regarding pricing. A lot of buyers took COVID, and the inflationary market that we're in to save for deposits and with favourable lending and policy for first home buyers this meant the appetite for apartments as owner-occupiers has never been higher. From an agency point of view, our team have been laser-focused and done a remarkable job of staying in touch with owners, adding value to the relationships they have been establishing for a long time and ensuring they've been giving the right advice. Our agents made over 15,000 proactive phone calls to buyers and sellers and our e-newsletters were read on average 80,000 times a month.
Whilst the first half of the year took a bit to heat up, the second half of the year was much more positive for landlords with rental prices starting to recover and vacancy rates reducing to pre-pandemic levels. Much is being said about housing affordability at the moment – as it should, it's incredibly difficult to find rental accommodation. Tenants and landlords both did it very tough during COVID, with vacancy increasing, jobs leaving our market place and prices crashing. It's promising to see prices recover and the year ahead anticipates a continuation of that trend.
During the last 12 months, we've continued to innovate; we have launched a new website, focussed on improving our digital reach online with 130,000 unique visitors to our website and over 1,000,000 digital property views. Several technological partnerships have meant our team can be even more focussed on delivering great results.
Whilst many pundits think the market will tank, our view is this: FY23 is going to be about stability and consistency. The rental market should start to normalise where demand and supply are more in tune with one another. Whilst there are predictions of interest rates capping at a cash rate of 2.85% - money continues to be accessible, which is very important for our first home buyers – sales prices should be steady.
With the economists and the media commentary forecasting a number of corrections – mostly for the bad, it's never been more important to have the team on your side. The team at Lucas will be here to support you.
