Author; David

Auction is the preferred sale method for most properties in Stonnington. It is the most transparent method, which is why buyers tend to prefer it. You know where you stand. One of the main benefits to vendors is that auction sales are unconditional. This means buyers need to have their ducks in a row before […]

If you hadn’t yet pulled out your Melbourne winter uniform (big black puffy jacket), you would have today. Winter is here.  It’s cold, wet, and windy. The Plane trees are bare, the winter solstice is next Friday, and the 2023/2024 financial year is about to close.  It’s been an interesting year, property wise. Positive overall, but […]

On Friday we held our annual Jellis Craig property event at the Glasshouse, hosted by Alicia Loxley, with some terrific guest speakers including demographer and author, Bernard Salt.  Bernard is a proud proponent of Melbourne.  He is so pro-Melbourne, in fact, that he challenges anyone to find such a prosperous, liveable, world-class city with as large […]

Recently I was listening to Sam Harris’ podcast, ‘Making Sense’, with guest Daniel Kahneman.  Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winning psychologist and author of the hugely popular book, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’. His niche is cognitive biases.  Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that suggests that for individuals, the pain of losing is psychologically twice […]

I recently had a mortgage broker request eight desktop valuations from eight of the biggest lenders in Australia on my property – the big four banks plus Macquarie, Bank of Melbourne, ING, and Bankwest. The valuations varied by 25 percent from lowest to highest. Granted, these were desktop valuations, but full valuations would have yielded […]

There is no clear consensus on the state of Melbourne property market right now. Ask 10 people how the market is, and you’ll receive 10 different answers, ranging from ‘about to crash’ to ‘about to take off’, and everything in between. From my perspective, the market seems great right now! I had two auctions in […]

We had our busiest Q1 ever for Team Fetter/Sciola, selling 32 properties in February and March alone. And then April hit and the market went ghostly quiet with Easter and school holidays, to the extent that we haven’t been sending out our weekly new listings email due to a lack of new listings. Fortunately, dear […]

Advertising a property for sale these days is not cheap.  Realestate.com.au is the dominant player in Melbourne, followed by Domain.  To advertise a house in Stonnington today on these two portals alone costs nearly $7,000 for their best available digital packages.  For this you can expect roughly 3,000 – 6,000 listing views on REA and 2,000 – […]

Melbourne is the auction capital of Australia, if not the world. No other city has such a strong bias towards auction as the preferred method for selling real estate. If you are a homeowner in Melbourne, the chances are that you have participated in auctions before, either as a buyer, seller, or observer. Auction is […]

It’s been a productive week for Team Fetter/Sciola with five sales in the last five days and five auctions coming up this week, including a twilight auction tonight at 10 Grace Street, Malvern.  We’ve had 10 auctions so far this year.  Three sold before auction, four sold under the hammer with multiple bidders, one passed […]