TG

Financial meltdown, footy finals, school holidays and our first (of many to come) mortgagee auctions. It’s a recipe for uncertainty, lack of direction, fickle interest and humble pie. Prediction for the next couple of weeks? Turmoil, amounting to absolutely nothing. We are living in interesting times. For those of us still at home in Melbourne, […]

Tears, tears, tears. And that wasn’t only the Collingwood supporters. Spring is supposedly a time of joy, but is now proving to be anything but for vendors. The zing is has left the town. Unless a property is unique, it’s a wallflower (and even for those, there’s no knock-on which can lead to new listings).

Kids, the market has turned. OK, you know that, we know that, but somebody really should tell the estate agents. They‘re still acting as if the boom rolls on. Their hope, it seems, is that if they don’t publish their poor results, reality will just go away, the Spring market will bounce back and all

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz. And if you listen to the agents, there’s about to be a re-play of last year’s Spring boom. Reality check: Unique AAA properties are still being bought, with some very competitive bidding. Anything less is anybody’s guess, but the trend is down, down, down. Mid-range, too many vendors

Now the other Olympics are out of the way, there will soon be no more excuses left to explain where the market is. It is now the start of the real estate Olympics. Top-end vendors have either been in Beijing or avoiding going to market when the world’s eyes are focused there. The real action

Auction results, clearance rates, statistics that mislead. The media quote agents speaking of rallies, rising clearance rates and more aggressive bidding. Not at the auctions we attended over the weekend. The REIV spruiks the line that buyers have a positive reaction to the drop in interest rates. Really? They’re representing agents, not buyers. Agents need

The weekend market was in line with the weather: frigid. Buyers had serious cases of cabin fever and vendors were so far north of the market that as a result next to nothing sold. How desperate are things out there? Desperate enough for the dummy bidders to come out from under their rocks; but they’re

This morning’s ‘Age’ reports the sale of 25 Turnbull Avenue, Toorak (at $2,650,000) as the weekend’s top transaction. No fault of the paper’s – they can only report what the agents report to them – but we can assure you that we were bidding at auctions where properties sold for a great deal more. In

The winter blues continue with most vendors still happy to hibernate until spring. Buyers? Still cautious. Still wanting to see more than what is presently on offer. And then there are some properties out there that just can?t be sold. Take, for example, 9 Barnsbury Road, Canterbury, 22 Mountview Road, Malvern and 52 Hampden Road,

We’re back ? truffle-hunting as usual, but this winter the treasures appear to be a mite more elusive. The most common question we have been asked over the last few weeks? “Has the property bubble finally burst?” We don’t believe so. There’s no real evidence to suggest a head-on crash, but with media reports of