[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.

[BlogSite.029] Human calendar added

Found this Human calendar from Annie's blog: A View on Design which is quite interesting - with photos of different people shown everyday.

Hope you like it!

[Tips.018] 2 Bathroom Ideas

Was chatting with a friend about some bathroom ideas the other day. While most of the ideas available on the Internet emphasize on tape ware and/or bath tub, there are 2 little things I like to share with everyone.

First one is shown in photo below from one of the display homes we visited during our last US trip. Did you notice other than the main mirror in the middle, there's an extra smaller mirror on the right hand side? At first I thought it was some sort of Makeup Mirror to allow you to look at different angles (from side/behind?), then I noticed it has some hidden secret in it.

As shown below, when it opens up, there's actually a small cabinet hidden behind. I think that's a pretty cool idea.


The second one is about the shower area. As shown in photo below - from a Domaine (now part of Clarenton) display home back around 2006, by simply extending the bath tub towards the shower area, you can easily create a little sitting area inside your shower where you can either sit down or hold/put other stuffs. This would be quite handy.

We also saw a shower during our US trip as below with similar design.

During our construction, we did ask for similar changes to our main ensuite, unfortunately the price quoted by our builder was quite expensive and it was later removed.

Hope you find this little tip helpful!

[Progress.160] Having fun with Blocks/Paving cleaning

The big garden blocks looks great in our backyard, but after moved in almost 2 years, recently we having been quite annoyed about the dirts all around it. Here's a photo of the stairs area, the dirts are on the capping, under the steps, ...etc everywhere!

A closer look shows all the dirty black things all over the place. we tried scrapping, brushing, ...etc but none of them seem to work as expected. One of our neighbours used these blocks for the fence at the front of their house, and as they probably haven't wash it for years it looks really ugly!

Someone told us about spraying some chemicals to remove it, but we were not really sure if that's a good idea. What if it just changed colour with the dirts still remained there??

Then a quick chat with our builder's maintenance guy the other day and he suggested to wash it with high pressure washer. Have a quick look at Bunnings and saw a few of them within $100-$200 range. Struggled a bit about whether should we buy one as we probably just going to use it once or twice every few years??

Luckily we have a neighbour who kindly borrowed us his little old "Karcher 300" as below:

It's quite noisy, and it took a while to connect the host, the long extension cable and move things out of the way. The machine is at least a few years old (can't find it in Karcher Australia web site any more!) and it leaks a bit, but it does the job pretty well!

We tried it on a capping on the side wall first, just in case anything out of control happened... At first we didn't know how to control the nozzle, and the first few trial looks like kids drawing, but the dirts were removed instantly.

We finally worked out how to adjust the nozzle head and after that was quite fun! Especially when all the dirts were removed, it's big relief and achievement to us!

After about an hour of hard work, we got all the stairs and capping cleaned, the final result as below, looks like brand new isn't it??!!

Few days later (before returning the machine actually :-) ...) we noticed we missed the 2 big sand stone cappings at the front... It's probably only a 5 minutes jobs, but it certainly took a lot longer just to setup and connect everything...

Die! You ^%^$%^&#@~@! dirt! Die Die! Ha ha ha.... Yes I was quite exciting....

After the wash, we have 2 beautiful cappings on the front fence...


Also noticed some of the paving gaps were filled with moss after a few weeks of heavy rain, specially near the water tank area.

Just look at all the dirty stuffs removed by the machine!

A slight issue with the paving cleaning is, the strong water also washed off quite a lot of the sand between the paving bricks. Have to get some more sand to fill it up later...

Any way, the whole cleaning experience was quite interesting and we probably would go ahead and buy a high pressure washer!

[Others.049] Insulation sagga for about 255,000 homes

There's been some quite scary reports about fire caused by insulation, and about 255,000 homes fitted with insulation under the program might have safety problems, substandard batts or installation faults after the government's $2.45 billion ceiling insulation subsidy scheme been scrapped.

Feel really sorry for those home owners. This would also be a huge risk for potential home buyers too. How would you know if the insulation been installed was up to the standard?? Will there be any sort of certificate issued by any authority for this?

Not sure if it's related, I mentioned about possible fire caused by downlights in July 2007 and then another follow up as well. If there's any downlights in your house, might want to check if any proper protection been installed around all the downlights.

I also did this burn latest in December 2007, just to make sure the insulation material we got is fireproof. Surely this wouldn't be a proper/official test method, but I guess if you just have insulation installed, it won't harm for you to grab some of those materials through the man hole and do some simple testing while waiting for official inspection!