Even Juniper Group’s Soul tower, which is yet to be completed, is said to have been chipping away with two luxury apartment sales a month over the past six months.
Local and interstate buyers, and a raft of expats, also have taken a growing interest in Southport Central, the former Raptis Group project which crashed into receivership in 2008.
Marketing manager Mark Montague, of Which Property, said after a strong sales run over the holiday period he expected to “break the back” of the remaining stock by the end of this year.
Mr Montague, who had 213 apartments to sell when first appointed in March 2010, now has just 100 apartments remaining for sale with properties priced from $300,000 to $460,000 generating the most interest.
He said fallover rates had diminished since the middle of last year when receivers pulled prices into line with valuations.
“I would hope that — with no surprises overseas — we could break the back of this in 2012,” Mr Montague said.
The most recent report from Colliers International estimated the Coast had 1227 new apartments for sale at the end of September last year, the lowest stock levels since 2004.
The take-up rate was 98 apartments for the quarter, although Colliers’ research manager Lynda Campbell warned even a small pick-up in sales could cut supply from three years to just two years.
Colliers’ Gold Coast boss Stewart Gilchrist said David Koch’s comments that the Gold Coast property market was a “catastrophe” was “not reality”.
He said many developers turned their hand to luxury apartments during the last cycle, creating an oversupply in that sector, but the supply of affordable two-bedroom apartments on the Coast was being absorbed relatively quickly.
Mr Gilchrist said price reductions on luxury stock also were driving interest in luxury apartments from interstate buyers looking for value.
CB Richard Ellis’s Gold Coast boss Mark Witheriff agreed. He said the oversupply of luxury stock was being misinterpreted by some observers.
“They just don’t understand the fundamentals of this market,” he said.
Mr Witheriff said there was a large number of “big units in big developments”, but when Oracle and Soul were taken out of the picture there was a significant shortage of affordable stock that traditionally lured buyers to the Coast.
“There are just five new apartments for sale at Main Beach. At the end of the last boom there were hundreds.”
Mr Witheriff said value buying had returned to some sectors of the market.
“In 2007, the Gold Coast was seriously overpriced by a long way,” he said.
“But in 2012, you could argue that some areas were undervalued.”
Mr Witheriff said the supply problem would be exacerbated by banks who were buying into the “catastrophe” talk and refused to lend to developers for new Coast projects.
“The tightness of funding is holding the Gold Coast property market back,” he said.
Billionaire developer Harry Triguboff, who plans to develop a 50-level tower at his Brighton on Broadwater project at Southport, this week weighed into the finance issue saying it didn’t make business sense for banks to cut back lending to the extent they have.
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