Latest News & Blog

  Image: The Lee family Tammy, Ava (7), Adam and Taj (9) have had their Redcliffe home on the market for three months with no offers. Picture: Steve Ferrier/The West Australian.   Activity in WA’s property market has reached its lowest point in 12 years, but new-home sales are increasing. The total number of documents lodged with Landgate — a barometer for total sales across new and established homes — was down 2 per cent last month and down 12 per cent from the same time in 2015. Victoria Park real estate agent Laurie Kelly said the past few years had been the toughest since he...

  If the television series Friends was made today, Joey and Chandler wouldn’t be there – their New York apartment would be permanently rented on Airbnb. “And Rachel wouldn’t be there either,” says Murray Cox, “because Monica would have seen how much money they were making next door and listed her room too.” He’s joking, but New York-based Australian Cox is serious about Airbnb, to the point that he is probably the online holiday letting agency’s global public enemy No.1. His website InsideAirbnb.com analyses the $A50 billion company’s own publicly available information to show how many...

Image: 6/15 Dulnain St, Mt Martha, sold for $567,000 — $1000 more than the median dwelling price.   BUYERS looking to crack the Melbourne property market are finding it more difficult than ever, with prices slipping further out of reach. A median priced home now cost 7.1 times the average household’s annual earning capacity. The latest CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report shows a median dwelling was priced at $566,000 last September compared to average annual household income of $79,266. CoreLogic senior research analyst Cameron Kusher said those aiming to buy a property were...

It’s a very rare day when a property manager doesn’t receive at least one call about repairs and maintenance. As you call your owner for authorisation, it is handy to be familiar with the different types of deductions investment property owners can claim. All property managers are familiar with managing the careful negotiation which can sometimes be required between landlords, tenants and maintenance professionals to arrange a pest exterminator, organise a plumber to fix a leaking tap or even to repair guttering which has been damaged by falling branches and debris. Tenants will no doubt...

There’s been as much heat in the property market along the Mornington Peninsula this summer as in the weather, and real estate agents are bracing for a busy Australia Day and a blazing end to the school holidays. As a knock-on effect of Melbourne’s growth spurt and transport woes, peninsula house prices are booming. Agents report a 10 per cent price lift over the past year and a shortage of stock as the area shifts from holiday spot to keenly sought permanent accommodation for families and sea-change retirees. Rocketing city property prices, traffic congestion and anxiety over elevated...

Most new housing being built in Melbourne is two-bedroom apartments, but should we be embracing three-bedroom designs to provide better options for families? On Tuesday, Lochlan Sinclair, an architect and design manager at Neometro, will join a panel of experts at MPavilion to discuss High Density Happiness: In Defence Of The Three-Bedroom Apartment. Mr Sinclair said he believed that in order for Melbourne to maintain its reputation as one of the world's most liveable cities, the design of apartment buildings must be reviewed. "As a city, we need to start considering better housing for...

THE Melbourne property market can be a truly heartless place. Anyone who has ever fallen in love with a property, mentally moved the furniture in and watched, crestfallen, as the price soared above the quote range at auction, knows what I am talking about. In some cases, nothing sinister is going on. The market is strong, and certain kinds of properties in blue-chip or gentrifying suburbs are exceeding many people’s expectations — agents and vendors included. But in other cases, buyers have a genuine right to feel aggrieved. They have been baited by agents, who underquote the property to...

IT’S got all the hallmarks of trendy inner city neighbourhoods. Coffee shops with a vast array of roasts, a small bar with a cosy nook to settle into. But this isn’t Sydney’s Newtown, Melbourne’s Carlton and Brisbane’s New Farm — all minutes from the CBD. This is Gosford — on the NSW Central Coast — and it’s one-and-a-half hours by train from central Sydney. If  you’re young and upwardly mobile moving a few suburbs out from the CBD is no longer enough. Now you might just have to suck up an achingly long commute if you want a new home. On Tuesday, NSW Premier Mike Baird said first...

SYDNEY, your time as Australia’s most sought-after address could soon be over.   Archrival Melbourne is threatening to steal the Harbour City’s crown, with its housing market slaying that of its glitzy big sister.   After being voted the world’s most liveable city for the sixth year in the a row, Melbourne property prices grew faster than those of Sydney.   A lot faster — homes sold in Melbourne went up an average 6.9 per cent in the year to September, compared with just 3.2 per cent in Sydney, according to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.   Why? It...

Soaring house prices have put the spotlight on some of Australia’s economic soothsayers.   At the start of last year, the common view among economists was that house prices would stabilise in Sydney and Melbourne by the end of 2016. Some even predicted prices would suffer a significant correction, falling by up to 7% in Melbourne.   But figures show the opposite happened.   According to CoreLogic, dwelling values rose staggeringly last year, by more than 15% and 13% respectively in Sydney and Melbourne, continuing the fast pace of price growth since the global financial...