[PropertyInfo.040] I can hear the bubble cracking....

I mentioned in this previous post "Bubbles, bubbles everywhere the other day about the almost crazy, wild rush we witnessed in a few auctions. Remember the little timber cottage with only 404m2 land with a long queue outside I mentioned? I went to the auction last Saturday and guess how much it was sold for...


I can give you the sold price of 2 other properties as reference:
*A 2 bedroom brick veneer with 316m2 land sold for $726K on 27th March in Auction (mentioned in the same post)

*A 3 bedroom timber cottage with slightly bigger land of 416m2 sold for $760K on 16th April.


The answer is as below:

$806,000 !

Yes, this is really crazy.

There's this article from The Australians today talking about Edward Chancellor, of US investment management firm GMO who predicted the GFC, saying:

"estimates Australian house prices are more than 50 per cent above their fair value -- a once in 40-year event. " If house prices were to revert to their historic long-term average (ratio of average price to average income) they would fall quite considerably,"

He said prices would have to fall by more than a third to reach fair value -- although some of this fall would be cushioned by income growth."

There's also reports about RBA might announce another rate increase tomorrow afternoon due to the soaring house prices. Let's wait and see how everything goes... But for sure, I can hear the bubble cracking...

[PropertyInfo.039] Bubbles, bubbles everywhere...

There were reports of property bubbles left, right, and centre from all media recently. Wonder if you agree or not? From what we observed in the past few weekends, everyone seems to have gone crazy, even worst than the peak back in 2003...

27/3 was called "Super Saturday" as it's the last Saturday before Easter break, with 34 on-site auction scheduled, and we witnessed 2 that day.

On 27/3 morning, we went to this Charles St house featured in previous week's local paper in Putney with friend.

The house was packed...

From the recent sales record of houses in the area, we estimate the land probably worth around $1.2M. From the quality of the house, we think it definitely won't cost more than $500K.

The auction was held at the backyard...

However the most shocking news was, the council still haven't approve OC (Occupation Certificate) yet due to some storm water issue. Looks like the owner must be in some sort of cash flow issue to put the property on the market in such rush...

There were quite a few active bidders and our friend was one of them. He quite "reasonably" stopped at about $1.9M, while the others just kept going. Finally, the young Asian lady with glasses, dressed in black in the middle of the photo below was the highest bidder with $2.118M. Unfortunately it still didn't reach the owner's "shocking" expectation of $2.5M.

We all think the house doesn't worth that much... Later this week, from the local paper, the property was listed as sold for $2.118M...

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In the afternoon, we went to another on-site auction in Epping. All the streets around the area were fully parked, and we heard a couple mentioned they have to walk almost 100m to come to the house... Unbelievable, just look at the crowd from the photo below...

It's a tiny 2 bedroom house, with only 316 m2 of land. Record from On the house as below showed it was sold in Oct 2005 for $560K.

The location is excellent as it's quite close to one of the best primary school in the area, and the competition was even hotter than the Putney one. Starting bid was $560K, and it jumped very quickly, finally sold at surprising high price of $726K, WOW!!

Consider another house on the same street with 697 m2 of land was only sold in May 2009 for $710K, paying $726K for a small house with 316 m2 is really ridiculous!

The property was chosen as the feature property in this weekend's local paper as below.

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This morning (10/4) we went to another open house in Epping, and we were quite surprise to see a long queue outside the house as photo below. Same as the previous mentioned one, the location was also quite close to the same primary school, no wonder it's so popular. But having so many people for the first open house is still quite amazing... What's going on? I thought RBA's rate increase this week would somehow calm the over-heated property market down a bit...

It's another small 3 bedroom house with 404 m2 land, price guide was over $675K and scheduled for auction on 1/5.

As below, there's still lots of people after we left... Would be interested to see how the auction goes a few weeks later.

[PropertyInfo.038] RBA's warning certainly has huge impact!

We have a busy day last Saturday (15/8), all spent on open houses and auctions.

We noticed in the morning that there was this big news on all papers about interest rate going to go up 2%, warning from RBA, ...etc. And that surely has a huge impact!

Some of the owners were safe, for example this house in Angus Ave which we missed previous Saturday's first open house. When we were there last Saturday it's already SOLD! We did expect it to be sold quite quickly as it's very close to school, a wide 22m frontage, still looks like in excellent condition from photos on Internet, and the price is within reasonable range based on recent sales record in the area. The agent Better Homes Realty is quite well known in local area and they certainly did an excellent job in the marketing of this property.

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While this other house in Chelmsford Rd is not that lucky - been auctioned in the same afternoon when the RBA warning was reported by all papers.

From the photo below the house looks huge, but when you went on site, it's not! The house in the middle of the photo actually belongs to the neighbour at the back. The brick color is almost the same as the fence and that causes the confusion. The front yard looks huge, but with a 612m2 land, that's all you have. The North and West side of the house is only about less than a metre from the fences, so there's basically no backyard at all.

The agent even hired this Cafe2U van to provide free coffee/hot chocolate for everyone. Not sure how's that going to help the bidding price other than attracting more people. I wonder if this is included in the marketing package with the agent or is that extra?

Or may be they should try the "luxury car" option as I mentioned in this post almost 2 years ago to add extra 10-20% to the property value...

Talking about the bidding, the whole auction process was a bit strange too. When the auction started, a guy standing right at the front, very close to the auctioneer, and about 2-3 steps ahead of the crowd quickly raised his hand and offered 1.1 million. Lots of people made a "Wah!" sound as rarely would any one made such a high opening bid. Specially been so close to the "owner's acceptable range of 1.1m - 1.2m" according to the agent. Quite naturally, no one follows, the agent then approached about 5 to 6 registered buyers within the crowd and no one responded.

After a few embarrassing minutes, he then went inside to discuss with the owner. Later the auctioneer announced a "1.175 million" vendor bid, and basically that's the end of the auction.

Spoke to a few people and everyone agreed either that guy is dumb, has too much money to spend, or must be a dummy/fake bidder trying to push up the price. He probably got too excited and revealed his intention too early, and in a very inexperienced way. If he started at the low 900K range, it would be a totally different result. Sometimes people are just too impatient...

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There's also this house in Kent Street, which looks quite nice and solid with the new paint - personally I don't quite like it as it would cover up lots of problems. And from the second photo below, you can see the owner smartly followed the "luxury car" option and parked a nice new sports car at the front...

But once we entered the house and checked all the closed doors/cabinets, it's a totally different story. The house was so heavily renovated that the hot water system and electrical/fuse meter box are now both located inside the house, hidden inside a few cabinets. There's even a bedroom with a downlight dangerously fell out of socket, dangling down from the ceiling.

And look at what I found hidden inside a furniture in the upstairs living area: 2 water tap knobs popped out from nowhere! Walk into the room behind the wall and you will see a small ensuite toilet, and a little basin where the tap was connected to.

The good part about the house is, there's a totally separated lower level floor with it's own kitchen, bathroom and currently rented out.

Looks like the owner did spend a lot of money in improving the house for the past years. But from those small areas mentioned above, even if the price is right, I would be quite worried about the quality...

[PropertyInfo.037] Quality concern for some newly built houses

Not sure how's the property market is going, some says up some says down. But for Epping area, quite surprise to see so many new properties been rushed to market.

Unfortunately when there's rushing, there's always quality issue. We went to this brand new, technically not 100% finished duplex the other day. Upstairs carpet still not finished, kitchen cabinate handle still not installed, big pile of sand and concrete still left at the drive way...etc, can't understand what's the rush to push it to the market in this condition.

On the bright side, we can clearly see the builder/owner spent quite a lot on the robes and cabinets. Even the garage have a full cabinet filling the whole wall, quite impressive.

But then I noticed this small problem in the garage as shown below, can you see what's wrong?


Hope you already pick up the problem, if not, have a look below. When the door been opened, it's blocked by the stairs! I guess technically you can say it's still accessible with the other door opened, but without any sort of protection I can expect that door to be scratched very badly quite soon...

If the quality is in this kind of condition in visible area, wonder what would it be like for other non-visible areas....

[PropertyInfo.036] Property Market booming after FHOB extended?

Before the announcement of the budget, there were lots of rumor about property market crashing after the "First Home Owner Boost (FHOB)" finished in end of June. Now that the FHOB been extended (see reports here and here, everything seems to change!

Not sure about your area, in Epping the best example would be this old unrenovated cottage, with 695 sqr meter of land --- perfect candidate for a knock down and rebuild. As it's quite wide it might be qualified for a duplex too (subject to council approval).

In the past 2 open houses it was always packed with interested buyers, most of them intended to knock it down as it's been vacant for almost 2 years and not in a very good condition.

When I was there last Saturday, I saw this old Apple II from 197? (same as the one in the photo below from Internet, with 2 huge floppy drives) sitting on the floor in the corner of a bedroom. I probably spent more time on this little cutie than the old house and if there weren't so many people around, I would be seriously thinking of ..... Sorry, back to the house...

The asking price was $620K, we think it should be somewhere in the high $600K area. Last Saturday we heard that there were already a few offers around $680K, which is pretty good. Wife called the agent this afternoon and was told the highest offer is in the $710K range and might even go higher, wow!

As it's not for Auction, there's really no deadline and would be interested to see how much it would be sold for in the end...

Is your area going well after the FHOB extended as well? Share your story with us!

[PropertyInfo.035] Is gutter leaking problem covered by insurance?

We have a guy from ABC Seamless, one of the gutter/leaf guard company to give us a quote for a leaf guard for our gutters the other day.

During his presentation, I noticed in his folder there were some information about 2 articles (see below) from Sydney Morning Herald about some major problems with the "high-front gutters" design.

The 2 articles with quite shocking information are as below:

Gremlin behind the walls


and

Government failed to tell builders of gutter rule: Opposition


As mentioned in the articles:

"People think it's just a matter of a simple roof leak, which they can then claim through their insurance,"

"But these homes will not be repaired by insurance companies if the original work was non-compliant. This guttering is not only a breach of legislation but an act of unwitting deceit, potentially causing health and financial stress to consumers. Then they pursue us, and we face litigation for non-compliance."

"Opposition's spokeswoman on fair trading, Catherine Cusack, called the widespread installation of non-compliant guttering systems 'one of the greatest failures in Australian consumer protection history'"

From the articles, looks like there were a few things not been followed during gutter installation, such as: (1) leaving a gap between the gutter and the wall, (2) there should be overflowing slots (holes) on the gutter, but some manufacturers leave it as optional.

Also, the design of "high-front gutters" is flawed as when there's more water than it could handle, the water will naturally flows toward the back - into the house as the back of the gutter is much lower than the front.

One other option of course, would be to have a gutter that has a higher back. And that's where ABC Seamless is pushing their special "high-back gutter" product and they claim to be the only one in the industry that's supplying this product - see the "Ogee" one as highlighted below, the page of all available gutter profiles is here.


There must be other technical complications or cost/installation issues involved, otherwise I don't understand why they also sell the "flawed" high front gutters?

Regardless of all these, yes, we all know that we have to clean our gutters regularly and yes, the leaf guard would help to prevent blockage. But my main concern is, is it true that insurance company won't be covering the cost if there's any problem? What options do we have?

Hope someone with experience/knowledge in this area can help to clarify, and any comments/suggestions welcomed!

[PropertyInfo.034] Mirror mirror on the wall, how much should I sell my house for?

I am always interested in how some owners/agents decide about how much should they ask for when putting a property on the market.

With the recent economic downturn, there were lots of mixed information every where. For example, there's this one about "Real estate agents flee industry", and this one talking about "Rising home loans could tip recovery".

I also mentioned in this post about owners trying to take advantage of the first home buyer grant and increase their selling price to a incredible level. And I just found a very good example in our suburb recently.

There was this developer who purchased a triangular shape land with an old house at the end of Willoughby Street Epping, applied for sub-division, knocked it down and build 2 modern houses. Can't remember if it's late last year or early this year, they were asking for over $920K each. Which we think it's ridiculously over priced.

If you search on the net, you might still able to find this page, which as shown below, asking for $849K each around April/May this year.


Then price dropped a lot and around Sep/Oct this year, it dropped to around $650K as shown in this page and a copy below.


Surprisingly, a few weeks ago we noticed the price rocketed to $779K! The latest ads is available here.


Based on our understanding of the market, from the size of the land and the quality, we think an acceptable price would be around $600K - $650K. Don't understand why would the owner do it like this, wasting time and effort, damaging it's reputation/image by keep on changing the price & agent every few months. All the buyers nowadays are really cautious and always do a lot of homework before making any commitment. If the owner had started within the reasonable range earlier this year, both houses could have been gone ages ago!

[PropertyInfo.033] More construction work on our street!

The other day I was awaken early in the morning by some machinery noise from the street. Have a look from the windows and found some guys working on the trees for the house across the street. It was a very special day for them, because their DA finally got approved by the council!

I mentioned in this post last November that there were 2 construction applications been lodged to council at roughly the same time, both to be built by Eden Brae.

The one on the other side of the street was approved within a few months, and right now they are already closed to lock-up stage.

The unlucky one right across the road from ours was knocked back a few times due to neighbours complaining about water drainage related issues and finally got approved in mid/end of November - almost 12 months of long battle.

According to an old neighbour who has lived on this street for more than 25 years, that side of the street was much lower than the street, and many years ago there used to be a huge pond at the backyard of those houses. It should be council's responsibility to fix the drainage but as we all know, there's always things that are more important and therefore nothing was done on that even though everyone complaints about it many times. And now when this new owners with no knowledge of the situation purchased the old house and applied for building a new house, both the council and the surrounding neighbours took this excellent opportunity to get the poor fellow to double, triple the size of water tank, do lots of extra things to help with the situation...

Now that it's finally approved, good luck to them and hopefully everything after that would be easier and less trouble...

Hope this helps anyone thinking of purchasing a property to think twice before buying a house/land that's lower than street level. Make sure you do lots of homework before you sign the dotted line!

[PropertyInfo.032] Is first homebuyer grant rise really going to help?

Auction Result
There was this house at 55 Dunlop Street, Epping going for Auction last Saturday (11th October) with an indicative price of "over $1.4 million". It was a nice Binet Home house just built in 2002, pretty close to where we are, and therefore we have been paying close attention to it. You would have to be extremely fussy like us, to pick up a few things: only 2.4M height ceiling, no living areas upstairs, and ground floor not leveled - with two 3 steps stairs within the house to enter kitchen and other areas at the back of the house. Other than these, it's a very nice house.

We thought the auction was at 2:30pm, and as we have visited the open house a few times, we got there that day around 2:20pm just to see how it goes. Unfortunately, I made a mistake, the auction was actually scheduled for 2:15pm. Surprisingly when we arrived there, it already finished! We ask a few people how it went and was told, it started at $1.4M, no one bids and it ended straight away. What a shocking result!

As shown below, it's now listed for sale at $1.485 Million. Well, good luck!


Don't be too greedy!
I then saw this news from news.com.au with the title of "House prices up as greedy cash in on first homebuyer grant rise".

The article talks about:
"GREEDY home sellers are taking properties off the market and re-listing them at higher prices in an attempt to cash-in off first home buyers."

"Vendors are already asking to re-list their property and if we tell them it's not an achievable amount, they take their business to a different real estate agent with promises of greatly inflated prices," a real estate agent, who did not want to be named, said.

Well, again, good luck! How can you blame the greedy traders in Wall Street if you are also doing something similar? I guess we are just ordinary people, who doesn't want a few extra ten/twenty thousand dollars for nothing?

[PropertyInfo.031] House price falling?

In case you are not aware, I saw these 2 articles in weekend Sydney Morning Herald about falling house prices which I would suggest any one interested in property to have a look: "Heads in sandcastles" and "House prices head south, north and east".

Some information from the articles as below:

"Amid a pile of bad economic news, in 85 suburbs this year, from Seaforth to Strathfield, the median home sale price has exceeded $1 million. "

"The AMP Capital Investors chief economist, Shane Oliver, warned that Sydney property was about 20 per cent over-valued."

"In the US the ratio of annual income to house prices is about 3:1. In Australia it is about 6:1."

"Home owners in Clovelly and Bronte put houses on the market around Christmas and immediately rejected generous initial offers. In the past month, both houses sold for 10 to 15 per cent less than those December offers."

"Last week, property and building forecaster BIS Shrapnel provided some comfort for home owners, proclaiming that Sydney house prices will rise 18 per cent in the next three years. Others say the market is ripe for a tumble. Either way, the next three years will test the very Sydney belief that people can get rich by buying and selling houses among themselves."

"This year, US house prices have crashed 15 per cent, and recently, the fall has accelerated towards 25 per cent. But if the US is the land of the housing bubble that popped, what is Australia?"

Have a read yourself and tell you what you think??

[PropertyInfo.030] Charlie's sad story

There's this sad story from Sydney Morning Herald yesterday about a Cabramatta bus driver who has dispute with his builder and has been living in caraven since 2002.

According to the article "the ground was never compacted and no slab laid", and "the right side of the house starting to sink into the earth".

Although this is only one side of the story, would be interested to see how can the builder explain how did the house pass the council engineering inspection on the slab stage before laying the bricks.

It's always sad to see stories like this happening, just wonder if Charlie had inspected the house with a private inspector much earlier, it would be much easier to pick up any problem and much cheaper to fix.

[PropertyInfo.029] What was your property worth 20 years ago?

We received this mail from local real estate agent Bruce Lyon today with some very attractive information. As shown below, it listed 4 local properties and compared the sold price from 1987, 1997 to 2007.

The first one in Beecroft has the biggest increase in 20 years: from $158K to $1.1M. Wonder what you think about this information but one thing is for sure: if you can hold on long enough, you certainly going to get a huge return on properties!

[PropertyInfo.028] Stylish dots on your benchtop

I visited a furniture shop in Belrose the other day and saw this product called "SafeSpot". As shown below it's simply adding some stainless steel raised dots on your benchtop, which helps protecting your benchtop from scratching, cracking or burnmarks. Not sure how much it would cost but definitely sounds like a nice, stylish and good looking idea to me.

I went to their web site and was expecting to see information about different ways to protect your kitchen benchtop. Surprisingly, 95% of the content (even all the photos in the gallery) are talking about installing those raised dots (Tactile?) on the floor. Only information I can find about installing the raised dots in the kitchen benchtop is this PDF file.

Well, may be the market for individual kitchen benchtop installation is much much smaller than governments and big corporates who need to add those dots on their foot path or drive way.

[PropertyInfo.027] How to be a property developer

There's this article from "news.com.au" titled "How to be a property developer" which I would recommend everyone to have a look. It talks about location, finance, council approval and a few other stuffs.

The opening paragraph described the most important thing about property development:
"BECOMING a property developer can be as simple as buying a block of land and slapping a house on it or buying an existing house, knocking it down and building a new one.

However, becoming a successful property developer is a different story. It requires time, research, patience, and a willingness to take calculated risks. "

The article also mentioned 2 books which I will certainly have a look: "Australian Residential Property Development: A Step by Step Guide", and "An Intelligent Guide to Australian Property Development", both by West Australian author Ron Forlee.

Hope you also find the content of that article both interesting and helpful to your property development journey!

[PropertyInfo.026] House prices to rise 40% in 5 years time?

"HOUSE prices are expected to rise by as much as 40 per cent across the country during the next five years, according to economic forecaster BIS Shrapnel."

That's according to "Housing affordability set to get even worse" from news.com.au.

The article also mentioned:

"In the 10 years before that house prices rose an average 6 per cent a year."

"In the past 20 years they have risen an average 7.9 per cent a year."

There's also another article titled "Land the issue, not prices" from Sydney Morning Herald today, that talks about:

"...the Reserve Bank shunting the blame on to governments that have given money to homebuyers while retarding the supply of land"

Indeed, if the government is giving out money but does not release enough land, the land price can only go up in the long run. Based on that, no wonder the house price would go up more than 40% in 5 years...

[PropertyInfo.025] Epping Station on the news, twice

Last Tuesday (18/3), Epping station was on the news twice. First was the "runaway" 289 bus which crashed onto the railway tracks in the early morning. Then NSW Premier Morris Iemma announced the new $12.5 billion "North West Metro" rail link to operate between the city centre and north-western suburbs by 2017, and Epping station will be one of the stations on the line.

Runaway bus
I arrived at the station around 7:20am that day and it's a very unusual scene, a bus on the rail track! I took a photo from my mobile as below:

Luckily no one was hurt, but it was a big chaos to the thousands of people rushing to work. I managed to squeeze onto a bus to Eastwood, board a train to Strathfield, then finally switch train and arrived at work only about 15 min late.

You can get detail report about this incident from this report on Sydney Morning Herald web site.

North West Metro
I reported here last July about this "Latest Preferred Project Report for North West Rail Link Released" from the NSW TIDC web site. Unfortunately this has been cancelled.

I think the "10-year-old" North West Rail Link was just about extending the existing CityRail network from Epping to Rouse Hill, as shown below (from page 4 of Transport Infrastructure Development Corporation - North West Rail Link Preferred project report, Volume 2).


While this "new" 32km North West Metro is about a totally different system from the existing CityRail, and according to Mr Iemma: "The North West Metro will run underground from the city, beneath Victoria Road towards Top Ryde, and then via Epping to Castle Hill, Norwest and Rouse Hill."

If you compare the diagram with the one above, you can see that this new line is quite ambitious, as it's a lot longer, according to news.com.au, will "run independently of the current network and have the capacity to double the number of rail commuters.", and according to the time line as shown below, expected to start construction in 2 years time.

I believe everyone would love to see this project going ahead, as it covers a much wider area when compared to the previous plan.

But, if the previous shorter one takes more than 10 years and everything is still on paper (before been scrapped...), my confidence for this much longer version to begin construction in 2010 and finished on time won't be that high.

It's just like a building company advertising about how beautiful their houses are. They displayed beautiful sketches of a huge mansion, claiming it can be finished in 2 years. But can not explain why their previous project home still unfinished after 10 years of construction...

[PropertyInfo.024] Auction result impacted by interest rate rise?

Last weekend we went to an auction in Winifred Ave, Epping. As shown below, everyone is expecting an interest rate rise on coming Wednesday and there's only about 7, 8 couple/families at the auction. The price guide at 1.45M was quite high for the location and house condition and we think it worth only around 1.2M.

I heard a couple next to us with an registration card, discussing whether to start bidding at 1M or 1.1M. But the auctioneer seems very confident and he starts the auction at 1.5M. Of course no one responded and he then dropped to 1.45M, then to 1.4M, and still no response. He then have a quick chat with the agent and announced a vendor bid of 1.45M. And of course that's the end of the auction. What a failure!

Today we went to a different auction also in Epping but in a much better location (Boronia Ave) and condition. You can see from photo below, there's more than 100 people at the auction. The price guide is also around 1.45M and it's the same real estate agent as the one I mentioned above.

I can remember the owner bought the house a few years back at around 950K, and we estimate it should sell for around 1.6M. Not sure if they learned the lesson or the owner has better understanding of the market condition (as interest rate just rised this week), the auctioneer used a totally different approach.

The bid starts around 1.1M, then moves up slowly: 1.2M, 1.25M, 1.3M, 1.35M, 1.4M, 1.45M, 1.46M, 1.47M, 1.48M, 1.49M, 1.50M, 1.53M, 1.55M, and finally sold at 1.555M. The winner sounds like a Korean family and they out bid the other party by just $5K, a very interesting result.

I guess even though the interest rate has risen twice in the past few months, if your location is good, house in well maintained condition, with well looked after garden, asking price is within market acceptable range, and the auctioneer can start from lower instead of a high price, you can still hit the "sweet spot" and find the right buyer...

[PropertyInfo.023] Horrible news about Sydney house value drops and people losing their properties

In case you are not aware, there are 2 articles on the Daily Telegraph:Landslide: Sydney house values drop and Grim repo man calls on 75 homes a week which talked about how Sydney house values have dropped in the past few years, and more than 75 NSW homeowners every week face losing heir properties due to unable to meet mortgage payments.

Some of the contents are quit shocking:

"Since the peak of the boom in early 2004, Sydney's southern suburbs has dipped the most in value, with the median price falling $82,750 over the ensuing 15 quarters, according to Australian Property Monitors figures."

"Other areas where the Australian dream is souring include Canterbury Bankstown which has registered $65,000 in losses, Sydney's south west $44,500 and Sydney's west $25,000."

"Among some of the worst losses studied, a home in New Cambridge St, Fairfield West bought for $780,000 in November 2004 sold in July last year for $415,000, a loss of 46.8 per cent."

"At Bond Place, Oxley Park, a unit bought for $455,000 in August 2005 sold last May for $250,000."

"At McAndrew Close, Lurnea, a house bought for $420,000 in December, 2004 sold last June for $267,000."

"Suburbs in the city's west, southwest and northwest were the hardest hit, with Blacktown becoming the repossession capital of Sydney - 84 writs in 2007. It was followed by Guildford (49), Fairfield (48), Merrylands (45), Auburn (42), Greystanes (37), Mount Druitt (37), Bankstown (32), Cabramatta (31), and Kellyville (27)."

"In Tregear, a home at 9 Gauss Place was repossessed and sold in August 2007 for $135,000 - 55 per cent less than the $300,000 paid for it in 2002. At 52 President Ave, Caringbah, a unit bought in 2004 for $421,950 was repossessed and sold in 2007 for $257,500."

"A Mount Druitt property purchased in September 2006 for $325,000 was repossessed and sold exactly a year later for $212,000."

"Since the previous interest rate rise last month, there has also been a jump in the number of homes listed for sale across the state by residents hoping to get a decent price before the banks were called in."

Today RBA is going to meet today and everyone is expecting the interest rate to rise again in tomorrow's announcement. Hope this would be the last one for a while, no one would want to have more house value drop or rent increases!

[PropertInfo.022] Beautiful stone fire places

We visited a stone design company near Parramatta during the weekend. They have a few quite special stone fire places on display.

We have no idea what's the market price for this product but they do look quite attractive at the price of $2000 each.

The other issue is, to install one of this we will need to find a place for it, and probably also some sort of fire under it...

The other special thing we found in that shop is, they also supply tiles. And we recognise this special one with fish patterns because we have seen it from our builder's tiler supplier - C & L before. Have a look at the price, C & L's price is $25 per square meter....