moko

Just when you thought that the doomed first quarter must lead to endless winter doldrums, a starting gun is fired and the race is on again.  Serious sellers are back. Serious buyers are meeting them. Serious money is abroad.  List and sell on the same day? What kept you so long? It’s a wave that’s […]

Lowenomics backfire “He’s raising interest rates to reduce demand and inflation.” That’s not working where we live. At the low end it might be moderating prices while it’s terrifying people with mortgages, but if you look up in Salubria it’s killing supply. All the doom talk is persuading owners to stay put and when enough

If so, it’s a whisper. It’s been the quietist January since 1987. A silence muted by two shelf-sitters, sitting since before Christmas at $18m Plus and $20m Plus. Plus no offers. Too much Plus is a big Minus. Why does the Peninsula matter? Because it often indicates what’s likely to happen in the wider market that

Some clarifications, and a cure for a hiccup. Remember yesterday’s very small good street in South Yarra with three homes for sale between $12m and $18m? Yes. Fulham Avenue. A little bit of history: Two have already been offered to deafening silences and the third is “swinging in the breeze”. The vendors, presumably, live on

In the dim, dark past (4 weeks ago), things were simmering. The top end was doing nicely. A sale here, another there. Mostly home-grown buyers. Some so big they hit the news, most behind closed doors. Rumblings were heard off-shore and lower down the ladder. But why hang around waiting for a crash when you

Are we back in the Dark Ages? It certainly feels like it with the last week of school holidays and a whole lot of not very much that can be spoken out loud. And the number of sales over the last quarter has probably nudged the fewest in 25 years.  Is there any light in

It’s a tale of two markets.  The Top. The Rest. Where we live it’s over the top. Where the pundits wander, it’s not — and that’s all many of them think is happening. The Top? Three whoppers in a week says boom, boom, boom. All Toorak. All Locals. $11k/sq m? Sold! The know-its who are

That unfamiliar sound you can hear in the streets of Toorak is the wind playing its song through all those leaves. It’s a tune called Nothing Doing. Buyers, sellers, agents — anybody who is anybody is off-market. Brighton? There’s a big brass band playing Sold! Sold! Sold!  No surprise. It often happens when talk turns

The real estate news is gloom, doom, interest rates, pass-ins, more gloom, more doom… That’s it? That’s all there is? No no no. And no. Up at the top, the news is (big) business as usual. 4 sales over $20m in 1 week That’s not a market hitting the skids. Two were public with multiple

Something we’ve been saying forever and a day. At the top end there’s not a lot of sense in talking about the market.  Every home is unique, each is its own market. It’s why the pundits are so easily fooled when they look at a sale which goes under or over the estimate and opine