It’s business as ‘normal’
The word ‘normality’ has a strange ring to it these days, as we find ourselves in a world where the rules which we usually live by change on a daily basis.
However, there is one aspect of ‘normality’ at Andriessen Property and Newcastle Property Management that hasn’t changed; our ‘normal’ is that we are still operating 100% with all staff still on board.
What has changed is the way in which we operate. Due to social distancing, some of the team are currently working from home. Furthermore, as we went through a whole system upgrade a couple of years ago and switched to a cloud-based software, even when team members are working from home, they still have 100% functionality working from home – we can event transfer calls through to them when you phone in, so you wouldn’t even know who’s at home and who isn’t.
As of Saturday 9 May 2020, the government allowed us to hold open homes for both sales and property management, and we were pleasantly surprised by the number of people we had attend over the weekend.
If you’re keen to look at a property, but don’t want to attend open homes we are happy to make a time to show the properties privately.
Property Management
Mindful as always of Government Legislation, in conjunctions with owner’s instructions, we have been supporting our tenants as much as we can.
We have previously discussed the Federal Government Commercial Leasing Principles During COVID-19 – Mandatory Code of Conduct, which must also be used in conjunction with the NSW Government’s Retail and Other Commercial Leasing COVID -19 Regulations 2020.
The NSW Government also introduced the Residential Tenancies Amendment (COVID-19) Regulation 2020 Residential Regulation.
After seeing the vacancy rate has increase over the last couple of months during lock down, we are delighted to see this in now decline.
As a result, we will commence Routine Inspections again from Monday 25 May 2020. These will continue to have some restrictions in place to ensure the well-being of our staff and tenants
Sales
The market naturally was fairly quite during the first six weeks of the Pandemic; people were understandably concerned over employment and we were in a state of ‘wait and see’ as to how this pandemic was going to affect Australia.
Confidence is improving though, and buyers are once again contacting us to inspect properties. We’re delighted to see numerous offers and sales occurring at solid sales prices.
What’s more we are being contacted by potential sellers looking to place their properties on the market in the coming weeks, so we are very optimistic this winter season will be a balanced market for both buyers and sellers.
It might not quite be at the levels we were experiencing, pre-lockdown, but it’s most definitely getting there, and as far as we’re concerned, it is definitely business as usual for us.
Should you wish for any advice from our highly experienced teams whether in regard to buying, selling or leasing a property we are here to help with any way we can.