The White Paper – December 2017 & January 2018

The Ray White Group has just recorded it’s strongest January result ever with more than $2.4 billion in unconditional sales, which is an exceptional way to kick off 2018. This was on the back of another strong month in December with $3.69 billion in sales.

January is traditionally the quietest month in the property calendar, so the group’s sales results indicate the fundamentals of the broad market remain strong. The market is hardly falling off a cliff. Quite the contrary. The strong feedback from our network is that the year has kicked off with balanced momentum.

In Perth, our CEO Mark Whiteman says a combination of optimism and new recruits have helped propel the West Australian sales lift. The State Government has also committed $6 billion in the current budget to infrastructure spending as the economy moves away from its reliance on mining. While this lift in our West Australian sales is very welcome, it’s too early to call the bottom of the market but it’s definitely an encouraging early sign.

And across Australia, it feels like a more balanced market, though underpinned by a shortage of stock in many areas but with continued depth in buyer demand.

The Victorian network continues to be a standout with strong growth, helped by the state’s incentives for first home buyers.

The New Zealand market saw continued activity over January which resulted in a number of new properties coming to market. Our New Zealand chief executive Carey Smith expects to see increased activity in February and March. However with the change in policy regarding foreign buyers there’s still a degree of apprehension from both buyers and sellers.

Our commercial network has just welcomed industry leader Dax Roep who joined Ray White Special Projects Queensland as Associate Director — Sales.

The Ray White Commercial’s network can also boast an outstanding national clearance rate of 90.8 per cent for 2017. Total sales for 2017 from 239 auctions are a leap of more than $200 million on the previous calendar year, when 166 auctions yielded $214.177 million — a selling rate of 87.35 per cent. In 2015, the clearance rate was 82.61 per cent.
During the December – January period Loan Market has recorded our best two settlement months ever. The December result of $886 million set a new high watermark and this was followed by $822 million in January. The January result represents 34 per cent year on year growth and reflected a strong pipeline of activity in the December quarter.

And it’s great to see so many new businesses around the network.

The power couple behind the successful Ray White Ipswich business – Warren and Deanne Ramsey – have just opened their next venture together in North Ipswich.

And Avi Khan has just opened a business to service the needs of the Marsden community.

Troy McLennan just joined Ray White and opnened his business in Swansea, the beautiful coastal beachside community south of Newcastle.

Back in Brisbane, well known former AFL player, Jamie Charman has also joined Ray White Albion.

And in Perth, another footy legend Ben Keevers has joined North Quays.

And it’s pleasing to see that we are receiving more positive feedback from our customers than ever before as our focus on customer service remains our highest priority.

Ray White maintained a fantastic vendor NPS of 91. Our response rate was a bit disappointing, dropping to 21 per cent but there is a natural dip over the Christmas break. We did send 1972 more surveys in January than December.

Ray White Belconnen topped the leaderboard again for customer service, while Justin Hartley of ray White Pegasus . From next week, residential vendor dual agent surveys will launch across Australia and New Zealand. Dual Agent surveying will mean that customers can complete a survey for two agents. This is appropriate for agents who work in teams, have joint listings or have sales associates. These surveys will help our network (and us) understand how customers are experiencing agents, individually. It will also show you how well agents work together on listings and gives us a better opportunity to recognise or coach more of our members.

I’m looking forward to seeing you all around the network.

Thank you, I’m Dan White.