Author; David

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 […]

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, […]