Author; David

If you bought and held a single fronted worker’s cottage in Prahran in 1975, it has roughly increased in value one hundred-fold (100X). $17,000 in 1975… $1,700,000 in 2024.  If you bought the same house in the ‘peak’ markets of 2017 or 2021, it is pretty much worth what you paid for it.  In fact, […]

Saturday saw our first round of open inspections for 2024 and, for a long weekend, it was busy.  We saw between 30 and 40 groups of buyers at some inspections. Strong numbers by any standard.  We always tend to see a bump in inspection numbers and online views in the first few weeks of a […]

Carla and I are thrilled to be back at work after (a little too much) quality time with our young kids. We are very excited about 2024, coming off the back of our second strongest six months in real estate ever – topped only by H2 2021, also known as the craziest real estate market […]

Spring 2023 is done and dusted. In 33 days, it will be 2024. Friday is the first day of summer. It’s hard to fathom… especially given the drab weather this week.  From a real estate market perspective, spring 2023 was a very solid and productive one. It was far better than spring 2022 in terms […]

Have you ever noticed how there aren’t any sales in a street for several years, and then suddenly there are a string of sales in short succession?  “Why is everyone selling?”, is the typical response from buyers when they notice successive or concurrent sales in the same street.  Very rarely is there a sinister reason […]

The race that stops the nation put a pause on auctions over the long weekend, but it didn’t prevent buyers from inspecting our open homes in strong numbers. We were surprised to see over 20 groups, even 30 groups attend some of our new listings on Saturday, suggesting that there are still plenty of buyers […]

The property market is subjective.  There are objective measures of the market, such as the clearance rate or auction volume.  Yet each buyer, seller, agent, owner or renter will have a completely different view of the market at any given time based on their own experience.  A prospective tenant right now will tell you how […]

As agents we love neighbours!  Neighbours are great! They pad out the numbers at our inspections. They usually speak highly of the property and the street in front of the genuine buyers. They come and show their support on auction day.  Neighbours also become sellers, eventually.  A large proportion of our database comes from meeting […]

I called a highly competitive auction on Saturday with 316 bids.  There were four bidders, with the final two bidding mostly in $1,000 increments for the last quarter of a million dollars.  Both were downsizers and both were highly motivated to secure this single level, north facing home with a double garage (tick, tick, tick for […]

Australian house prices are about to hit a new record high, according to CoreLogic data as reported by the ABC. House prices nationally are just one percent below the previous high in April 2022, and are growing steadily across the country with Melbourne up 4.3 percent since January.  Sydney is up 10.6 percent since bottoming […]