It's raining in Victoria and that is doing rural morale more good than the apparent end of the global financial blight.
"Nothing beats having it wet and muddy," said Shane Noonan at valuers Herron Todd White in Mildura.
It's raining in the cropping and grazing belt of southeastern Australia, stretching from the central west of NSW right down to Tasmania, and the rain is good, slow soaking rain that has come at exactly the right moment for the grain that was planted about a month ago.
"We will see a lot of property coming to market this spring," said Shane McIntyre, Elders Victorian rural sales manager.
"There was very little offered at all in the last year because there was no 'season', that is, there was no rain and basically, no crop or harvest. This autumn just gone was one of the quietest property offerings for 20 years.
"The drought meant the properties were in no fit state to market and the global financial crisis kept the buyers away.
"All that will now change dramatically."
One large-scale cropping property which has recently sold is Doroq, a 2331acre (935ha) operation in southern Victoria's Geelong district, marketed by Elders' Ken Drysdale.
Mr Drysdale had sold the same property six years earlier for $1400 an acre. This time, Doroq was passed in at auction at $2435 an acre and finally sold "for considerably more than that". Although a final price was not disclosed, it was a record for the district and local talk has it at about $6.5million.
Doroq is a particularly productive property that generates record district yields of its three rotational crops, wheat, barley and canola.
It has been well managed and fertilised, is within 30 minutes of Geelong's grain terminal and port, and was bought by an unnamed farmer with rural interests on the edge of Melbourne.
The sale process for Doroq began before the rains, which started during the sale campaign and gave a great boost to local confidence, as had Elders' April sale of another district property, Parmelias, a 547acre bare-cropping operation which brought $3000 an acre.
"Both Doroq and Parmelias brought record prices for the district," Mr Drysdale said.
Mr McIntyre said the signs were good: "There is a buoyancy in the sector which I haven't seen for many quarters, and I expect to see a great many large broad-scale and cropping properties being offered for sale in the next months."
Mr Drysdale agrees. In the past two months, he has sold $9m worth of rural properties in the Geelong district and another $4m in rural lifestyle properties.
"That is as solid as it's ever been," he said.
But for Victorian properties that rely on irrigation water, things remain desperate and these rains won't help for some time.
Mr Noonan says the rain has underlined a surprising development in Victoria's mallee belt.
In this sandy soil, you can grow a crop on 10-12cm of rain, which is just not possible on heavier soils which are the traditional farming soils.
"No one wanted this sandy soil 20 years ago," he says.
In the Victorian districts between the mallee and the South Australian border, rural properties are now selling for between $350 and $500 an acre.
But it is not just the rain that is finally turning in the rural sector's favour.
The dollar is trading at about US80c, which markedly cuts down on two of the main rural inputs: fertiliser and fuel, which were both running at extremely high levels this time a year ago.
In addition, the general conviction that the financial crisis is easing has restored much buyer interest and confidence, Mr McIntyre said. "Add to this an average or above-average crop yields this season, and the rural sector here will really power."
