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How Much is a Car Space Worth?
This is a perennial buyer question and one that is quite difficult to answer. It depends on the expectations of the buyers, which is affected by the location, price, availability of on street parking and proximity to amenity including public transport. Few people are expecting off street parking for a tiny period house next to […]
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What have house prices done in the last 10 years?
There is an old rule of thumb that house prices double every seven to 10 years. Over generations, this rule of roughly seven percent annual growth holds up fairly well. But as with all markets, timing is everything. It depends on which seven to 10 year period you are looking at. And while some houses […]
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Twilight Auctions
It’s springtime in Melbourne and while it might be premature to put the puffy jacket away or switch the air conditioner mode to ‘cool’ just yet, the weather is improving, and the days are getting longer. October and November are traditionally the busiest auction months of the year, with the ‘Super Saturday’ before the Melbourne […]
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What to expect this spring
Saturday was our first auction weekend of spring, and the mood was positive with the pear trees in full blossom, the sun shining, and strong numbers at our opens and auctions. Team Fetter/Sciola had three auctions scheduled. Two sold before at the top of the range, and one sold on Saturday under stiff competition with […]
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Buyer Stereotypes
We deal with a lot of buyers. Hundreds per week. Thousands per year. There are over a million contacts in our database across the Jellis Craig network. If you’ve ever enquired on or inspected a Jellis Craig property, you’re in there. One of our fundamental roles as real estate agents is qualifying buyers. For a […]
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Bucking the Trend
There were more surprisingly strong results last week, bucking the trend of the now widely reported price falls across Melbourne. A family home in Malvern sold (with a competitor) for half a million dollars above the range. It was a good house. It wasn’t exceptional or newly renovated, but it was attractive, well positioned, conservatively […]
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Armadale: Victoria’s Most Wanted
Yesterday we visited Realestate.com.au’s head office in Richmond and were presented with some intriguing insights and statistics. REA is Australia’s dominant real estate portal, with 124million visits per month, which is 3.36 times their nearest competitor. I was amazed to find out that Armadale was the most searched suburb in all of Victoria. (List below). […]
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Green Shoots
The market has been cooling for nine months already. I picked the turning of the market on Cup Weekend 2021. We were finally out of lockdown (for good) and expecting the property market to continue on its merry way once restrictions eased and we had freedom of movement. The exact opposite happened. Our inspection numbers […]
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Slim Pickings
Last year was unusual. Last year was extraordinary. Last year was a one-off. There was a Thursday in October when I called six Zoom auctions in a row and all of them sold with multiple bidders, above the range, in less than 18 days on market. Clearance rates were above 90 percent, and I can’t […]
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Why you should be thinking about borrowing capacity, not house prices
When I bought my first family home my buying journey was stereotypical. We started looking at properties that were well within our means. Unfortunately, we didn’t like them. They weren’t big enough or good enough. They had too many compromises. We would have outgrown them too quickly. So what did we do? Like any self-respecting […]
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It’s always about price…
Like humans, all properties have their faults. There is no ‘perfect’ home. Even at $7,000,000 in Stonnington you won’t necessarily get a garage or North orientation. When a house is struggling to sell with limited interest, it can be tempting to focus on its shortcomings to justify or explain the lack of buyer engagement. But […]
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Perennially Popular Prahran
The news editor from realestate.com.au approached me this week for comment on Prahran and its appeal. The context being that Prahran has bucked the trend of stagnating prices by posting a quarterly median house price gain of 10.6%, and they would like to know why I thought this might be the case. At the risk […]
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Is the market cooling or is it just winter?
The real estate market is seasonal. Particularly in Stonnington. Our year goes like this: January – Closed (everyone is in Noosa and/or Portsea) February – Opening Market (a good month to sell with a full buyer pool and limited stock) March – Busy (a good month to buy and sell… Make sure your A/C works) […]
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Do you want to be Aldi or Armani?
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 […]
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Why you want a busy agent…
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 […]
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Post Election Bounce…
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 […]
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There’s never enough choice…
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 […]
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Markets are like people…
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 […]
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David Sciola 