Author; David

There is a reason why we encourage all our vendors to invest thousands of dollars in professional styling. Because presentation is everything. If you want a premium result you must look like and feel like a premium offering. Painting, new carpets, styling. This is the low hanging fruit. This is the $20,000 investment that can […]

Being a real estate agent is a competitive pursuit. We don’t get a salary. We don’t get paid while we sleep. We pay our own super and payroll tax. 100% commission means no sales for the month equals no income for the month. Feast or famine. And I don’t expect one iota of sympathy from […]

First and foremost, a huge congratulations to our very own superstar, Carla Fetter, for absolutely crushing her AREC speech to over four thousand real estate agents on the Gold Coast on Sunday. She did our team, our office, our network and our industry proud as she inspires a new generation of agents with her candid […]

Another perennial question we get from buyers: “Is there more stock coming after… the election / winter / summer / Easter / (insert calendar event here).” The answer is usually, ‘no’. We live in a market of scarcity at the best of times. If you remove the new apartment market, Stonnington consists of a finite […]

Unpredictable, volatile, driven by emotion. You may recall learning in economics that markets are efficient and governed solely by the effects of supply and demand. This is nonsense. Especially for the real estate market. You just need to sit in on one of our post-auction negotiations to see that at the pointy end of a […]

There has been a lot of negativity in the media recently surrounding the property market. ‘Doom and gloom’ sells a lot more ad space than ‘reason and balance.’ I’d even call it fear mongering, the current conversation around interest rate hikes. I attended an excellent presentation on Tuesday by Domain’s Chief of Research & Economics, […]

Until yesterday, the last time the RBA lifted the cash rate was November 2010. You may recall seeing the news on your brand new iPhone 4, just a month after the Pies won the Grand Final rematch against the Saints. Time flies. The cash rate back then was 4.75%. Today it is a measly 0.35%. […]

When selling a home, time is not your friend. More time does not equate to more interest. Usually the inverse is true. The longer the days on market, the harder it is to get a great price. You don’t often hear someone saying, ‘we were on the market for 107 days and then someone came […]

I often get asked from buyers why would an owner sell off market? It’s very good question. And like most good questions, the answer is not a simple one. Carla and I sell more properties off market than most teams in Stonnington. Last year we sold 24, which works out to be roughly one in […]

Election day 2019 was the inflection point of our last market cycle. It was the bottom, the nadir, of a very challenging market correction that saw prices in Stonnington fall by as much as 10 to 20 percent from the November 2017 peak, with clearance rates wallowing in the 40’s and 50’s for many months. […]