T.E.T.

At the top end? Everyone’s gone to the races. See you next week… Something to say? Your comments are welcome. Click on ?Comments? below.

The big weekend! The Melbourne Cup of auctions! The biggest of the year! The bidders are at the barriers! The lights are flashing! They’re off! Or not! Super! Saturday! It was a weekend with plenty of !s. Big bets from both buyers and sellers, but not every one a winner. Especially at the top end,

What a difference a year can make. From last October’s TET: Monday, October 13th, 2008 A bunch of years ago, Bob Dylan wrote The Times, They Are A Changin’. He could have been singing of now; as we write, banks are going “Whoops”, Governments are going “Oh bother”, car dealers are saying “Where is everyone?”,

Up here at the top end, interest rate rises or falls typically have only muted effect. Over the weekend, that effect was not only muted, it wasn’t heard at all; drowned in a deafening chorus of bidding. Anything AAA had four or five bidders prepared to pay premiums for the keys to the door. Given

The Spring real estate racing carnival is off and running – the touts and their vendors are out in force and you can feel the excitement in the air. But. But where’s the quality? At the top end, it’s as if the Melbourne Cup were being run with a country race field. Out of 10

For a couple of hours on Saturday – long enough to make it into Sunday’s papers – the REIV’s website was reporting the highest price paid at auction was $7,285,000 for a four-bedroom house in (drumroll) Ashwood! Ashwood? It seems a decimal point’s slip was showing. In fact, in what the REIV was touting as

Last weekend, according to the REIV, “… was one of the strongest auction weekends this year…”. They reported 707 auctions and a clearance rate of 83% Wait a day and Australian Property Monitors reports that the market is losing steam, Melbourne properties sold were down 43% and a clearance rate of 73.7% No wonder the

The top end is another country. In some places, it’s another planet. $722/sq ft in Toorak? Would you like a Brooklyn Bridge with that? But it happened. 10 Irving Road sold for $3,575,000 ? and it’s on the wrong side of the street. When this year left harbour, no-one would have expected to see even

The law of gravity has been repealed, what goes up stays there and it’s 120 days to Christmas. OK, it’s Melbourne in Spring. We, as advocates, spend a lot of time clenching our fists and squeezing our eyes closed and willing, willing , willing a crack to open in the market and for prices to

What’s happening? Without a lot of warning, the favoured few are kicking the ball out on the full. Geelong, St Kilda, real estate. The certanties are suddenly less certain, the confidence evaporating. How can we tell? Those vendors whose expectations have moved higher than the market are lonely as shags on rocks. The lemons are