Author; David

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 […]

For the first time since early 2022, buyers are telling us that they’ve finally got choice. It’s not unusual for some buyers to be inspecting seven or eight properties on a Saturday.  When buyers feel like they have choice, they also tend to feel like they have more time, or less urgency.  If I wait […]

According to PropTrack, Melbourne home values have only increased by 15 percent since Covid (March 2020). Over the same period, Sydney has risen by 30 percent, Perth by 46 percent, Brisbane by 56 percent and Adelaide by 60 percent. In other words, Melbourne has seen half the growth of Sydney, a third of the growth of […]

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 […]