On 18 October 2022, Dott & Crossitt hosted an information night for First Time Home Buyers at Penrith Panther’s League Club. We were joined by a number of experts in the field, such as Tom Panos, PEXA’s Joshua Radford as well as local agents David Lipman, Leonidas Proestos, Chris Rayner and Kate Spence.

The presentations covered a range of topics and included some analysis as to whether the market dip had reached its bottom. Tom Panos argued that if the market was a clock, prices have  reached 5 o’clock – so not much longer till the bottom of the cycle!

Tom Panos,who usually coaches and mentors real estate agents, gave a rare bit of insight to buyers in attendance, including some tips on how to bid at auction. But the best advice of the night, was to make use of the abundance of data available these days and to ‘become your own registered valuer’.

In terms of getting access to data for the property market, there is no better source than PEXA. PEXA is a leading Australian company that has pioneered digital property settlements. Now more than 99% of Australia’s property transactions are settled on PEXA’s secure, lightning fast platform.  As such, PEXA is a repository for rich real-time data on property transactions; not just price, but financed amounts and types, counterparties involved, suburbs and postcodes.

Josh Radford proved to us what we conveyancers in Western Sydney already thought was true: that the property market in areas like Penrith, Jordan Springs, Schofields, Box Hill and Kellyville is booming – in fact these suburbs ranked nationally as the areas with the highest transaction turnover in the last financial year.  And the suburb which was most active (which we can vouch for conveyancers) was…Marsden Park!  

Our own licensed conveyancer based in Penrith and the Blue Mountains, Joanne Rolls presented on First Time Home Buyer incentives – with a particular focus on First Home Buyers Choice, an exciting new scheme due to start in January 2023 where buyers can opt indefinitely defer their stamp duty in place of a annual property tax.

Finally the night ended with a panel of local real estate experts answering questions from the audience and from the moderator like ‘which suburbs is due for the most capital growth in Western Sydney’ and ‘will the second airport increase demand for housing in the West’? The real estate agents on the panel, who are fierce rivals professionally, sparred on a few points but all agreed that the property market in Western Sydney is due for very exciting years ahead.