Posts by Cate Bakos

Saturdays can feel long for those on the property hunt, but with some insider tips, productivity and success rates can dramatically change. While Saturdays aren’t the only days to inspect properties, they are the main days for open for inspection activity. Agents aren’t always available to chat though, and often the properties of interest have…

We are often asked by prospective clients if we will door knock, or letterbox drop notes directly to owners. This is not a favoured approach, and for several reasons. It is easy to imagine how a vendor will feel if they receive a letter in the letterbox from one buyer who is particularly keen to…

Every quarter, Core Logic prepare a ‘Pain and Gain’ report on the Australian property market. The data breakdown is quite granular, capturing local government areas and segmenting houses and units. Sometimes the data is quite telling, and this first quarter of 2024 is interesting. The headline figures were reasonably encouraging. “ “The rate of profit-making…

Sentiment counts for so much, and it’s interesting to see the correlation between buyer attitudes and interest rate chatter. As our Reserve Bank meetings approach, plenty of buyers momentarily put their plans on hold and ‘wait it out’ for the RBA interest rate decision. In 2022, real estate agents were cognisant of auction schedules and…

Victoria’s property performance has been lacklustre for quite a while now. Since the market started to correct in May 2022 when interest rates started to rise, property prices haven’t quite returned to the highs of 2021. The chart below shows the quarterly change in values, with Melbourne in red. Unlike most capital cities, Melbourne’s performance…

Overlays are often misunderstood, and sometimes the presence of an overlay is not even noted by purchasers. They feature for a reason, though, and sometimes an overlay can restrict the use of the land and/or add significant costs. Many of us are familiar with the concept of a heritage overlay.  This generally applies to period…

We sometimes meet buyers who have been looking for over a year, in fact some take years. Unless the brief is ultra-specific and the home is particularly scarce, anything over six months suggests that something is wrong. Three weeks to three months is how long almost all of our briefs take. There are quite a…

Twenty years ago I took a fortnight’s leave from my corporate job to map out a property investment strategy for my husband and I. We had investments between us, but we hadn’t really devised a strategy. We’d each taken snippets of advice and information and when we got together, our investments were diverse and not…

From first home buyers to upgraders, down-sizers to investors, I see these mistakes made all the time. And they can be really devastating at times for some buyers. The first relates to auction price quoting. Unfortunately our system in Victoria is based very much on quoting as low as possible, in an attempt to attract…