Residz Team 3 min read
There’s nothing more thrilling than spotting a real estate bargain. Indeed, U.S. research has found women enjoy shopping for a home more than dating! So, how my heart flutters to find a little cottage in a Victorian town listed for $139,000. With it’s bullnose verandah and pretty proportions, it’s straight out of a Country Style magazine.
I’m imagining our future together. Me in garden gloves holding secateurs, her gleaming in fresh paint with climbing roses on the verandah posts. My giddy enthusiasm is completely dismissing any downsides - the substantial renovation costs, the ugly industrial building next to it, the lack of established trees, the fact I can’t personally inspect it, the town being 10 hours away, and that I have no money to buy it. All this reality spoils the dream.
Therein lies the problem. In this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, looking at real estate ads is a daily escape from reality. Real estate window shopping lifts us out of our day to day, all scenarios appearing ripe with possibilities.The tricky part is when you decide to part with your money.
A recent Zillow survey found 75% of U.S. buyers expressed some regret about their recent home purchase.
These are the people who wanted the dream and are now living a nightmare.
Over the past two years home buyers have been shopping in conditions ripe for regret, explains Ronda Kaysen in The New York Times. Like Australia’s property market, the U.S. has a real estate environment where “prices have soared, inventory has plunged and competition has been brutal.”
Buying a home is when you most need to be cool, calm, and collected. Among the many wild facts about our property prices, the median price of an Australian house is now over $1 million. This means that in the past year half the homes sold for more than a million, and half the homes sold for under a million. It’s those cheaper homes at the bottom end of the bottom end that can lead more of us to make an irrational decision.
Emotions get carried away when you find a doer-upper. With all the freneticism of the past two years, you’d think there wasn’t an affordable house left in the whole country. But actually there are about 12 million dwellings in Australia and plenty of them will be very affordable if and when they hit the market.
CoreLogic estimates there were almost 598,000 house and unit sales across Australia over the year ending August 2021. The cheapest homes are in remote and regional areas, and these appear even cheaper to FOMO buyers from the capital cities, used to paying a million dollars for a knock-down-and-rebuild.
But many buyers are unfamiliar with the towns they buy into, and could regret their purchase. Real estate expert Andrew Winter says lifestyle options of what look to be great areas must be weighed against any risks associated with the suburb or property. This is where research, research, research comes in.
Residz.com has data about every address in Australia on the one free website. It is a good place to start to appraise why a bargain-priced home could be so affordable.
Some of the features on Residz.com include:
As we move towards a calmer environment for buying and selling houses, it’s worth taking the time to do as much due diligence as you can before handing over your deposit and signing a contract of sale. Beautiful little cottages for sale may not be common, but it seems regrets in buying them and other doer-uppers can be.
Image: 1920s house, Wellington Real Estate, Victoria.