Shop the sale: Selling property at discounted prices online

Real Estate

Team MONEYME|19 July 2022| 2-minute read

Who doesn’t love a sale? With each shopping holiday that rolls around consumers spend big to nab a discount. In China, consumers are even buying heavily-discounted homes. Will this trend take off in Australia?

Shop when prices drop

Hungry eyes scour the web looking for a new pair of discounted kicks every time a new shopping festival rolls around. From Black Friday, Cyber Monday to the annual Boxing Day sale, consumers are giving their wallets a workout more days than not. 

One of the latest holidays to catch on is Singles’ Day. The event started in China as an anti-valentine’s day celebration in the 1990s. On November 11 each year people support each other for being single with no need to mingle. Since then Alibaba CEO and billionaire Jack Ma has turned the tradition into a massive 24/hr shopping spree.

The latest shopping festival has become…well a festival. Taylor Swift performed at the 11.11 Countdown Gala in Shanghai in 2019 and Pharrel Williams headlined in 2017. The 2021 festival year had all the buzz of the years before, reporting record sale figures of $US56 billion.

There was something for everyone, from discounted products to luxury goods and even homes. That’s right, actual homes. In 2020, Alibaba’s e-commerce platform TmallHome put 800,000 homes up for grabs on Singles’ Day.

Selling property at a discount

In the lead-up to Singles’ Day last year 40 million people were scouring TmallHome online for a property. The Singles’ Day discounts were designed to push potential buyers into becoming homeowners with the click of a button. All of the units on offer came with a discount of up to 1 million yuan (that’s $212,000). 

In China, properties need to sell like hotcakes to keep huge developers afloat. The country has enough vacant homes to house more than 90 million people (FYI that’s more than 3x times the population of Australia). That means the market has a serious case of oversupply. Australia’s got the opposite problem, it’s got a supply shortage and a tight real-estate market, so it’s unlikely we will see similar property sprees here in the near future. 

But that doesn’t mean buyers aren’t on the hunt for discounts. Research out of Domain shows property price discounts are on the up in Sydney and Melbourne. In Sydney, the number of sellers offering mid-campaign discounts jumped to 9% in October from 5.9% in July. In Melbourne, discounts were up 4% in the last month alone.

Key Takeaways:

• The psychology behind Black Friday and Singles’ Day still applies to property. People are reeled in at the prospect of a bargain. 
• Marketing property sales around global shopping festivals could help lure in new customers.

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