Property

This season of the Australian Football Tournament (AFT) has been atrocious. First, they brought in all these rule changes, then they decided to take six weeks off “just because”. Is this sport being run by monkeys with hammers? No, sorry, that’s an insult to monkeys and hammers. The quality of the sport has literally never been worse.

I actually think it would be better if they replaced the professional athletes with people trained in providing a conveyancing service. St Kilda would definitely perform better if they got rid of all their players. I genuinely believe a conveyancing lawyer would have more skills than these professionally trained athletes. Even if they didn’t have the skill, I’m sure they’d care more about winning than the St Kilda Angels would. And don’t even get me started on good old the Lime Greens. They’ve been the worst of the bunch. For some reason, the AFT has decided to put their games on every Friday night, but it’s hardly watchable. It’s like they want to throw money away.

If you work in conveyancing for Carlton properties and know how to kick a ball more than ten metres in a straight line, then congratulations, we’ve got a new job opportunity for you! You can’t be worse than the literal potatoes they put on the field every Friday night. Heck, I could do a better job, and I broke my legs in a tragic skydiving accident six years ago.

Maybe I should follow a different sport instead. I hear that competitive sandwich eating is going pretty well at the moment. Underwater volleyball is always fun to watch, too. Then there’s professional submarine racing, which my friend thinks is the new Formula 7. There are a lot of other options, but I think I’ll stick with AFT, even though I kind of hate it. Won’t they just cancel the season already so I don’t have to watch it any more? This season doesn’t count anyway, because my least favourite team is probably going to win the big silver cup.

I just read an article outlining what a million dollars can buy you in today’s property market, and comparing this across Australia’s capital cities. Hobart, apparently, is still seeing soaring house prices, albeit from a low starting point, while Sydney offers its usual fare of inflated valuations with weekend auction mania only reinforcing that position. At the end of the day, it seems, you’ve just got to accept that property prices are always going to be on the up.

I mean, what do you expect when auctioneers are giving away 8-packs of toilet paper to the first bidder of the day? That’s a thing – seriously, look it up. It’s certainly one way to get the ball rolling, although I have to say that it’s a bit manipulative, what with how desperate people are for loo rolls at the moment. It might seem like a harmless, light-hearted move, but people can be persuaded into things they wouldn’t normally do when the pressure is on. 

Imagine this: you head over to an auction just for interest’s sake, and end up bidding on a whim in hopes of scoring some toilet paper for your family. Next thing you know, you’re sitting down with a conveyancing lawyer, trying to explain to yourself how you got here. It was just an innocent first bid to get things started (and secure yourself those coveted rolls), and not really meant as a serious offer. But with the toilet paper prize off the table, nobody else bothered to bid, and you won the auction.

So it is that you’ve found yourself at your local conveyancing office, Brighton property prices looming over you – really, a new apartment is the last thing you need right now. You’ve got bigger fish to fry, what with this months-long toilet paper shortage and all. And yet here you are, going through the Section 32 of your newly acquired property like a chump. Granted, you got it for a steal because you were the only bidder, but the reserve was high to begin with. 

Here’s a question. Why do property sales always go through real estate agents? Put that in your hat and sit on it. 

This is not meant to be making a point, or some kind of brain teaser. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s actually a perfectly satisfying answer out there; as someone with very limited knowledge of how the property market works, I’m genuinely open to that. It’s just that, knowing only too well how careless and, frankly, slack real estate agents can be when it comes to managing rentals, I don’t get why we put so much faith in them when it comes to property sales. 

When I say ‘we’, I’m mostly referring to buyers. Vendors can trust them more because they’re paying them, but buyers are just left to go along with it and hope the agents will point them in the right direction rather than just do their best to push them into buying something. There are actually professionals that buyers can hire to advocate on their behalf, doing the kinds of things that real estate agents do for vendors, but not that many people seem to know about this.

I’m talking about property buyers’ agents. Around Melbourne, I’m guessing, there are probably quite a few, but people just don’t realise it’s an option. It could also be that, when you’re buying a house, the last thing you want to do is shell out more beans for yet another type of professional input – and that’s before you’ve even got the conveyancer involved. But hey, can you put a price on buying a house you actually want, rather than one you’ve been bullied into bidding on?

It’s all about the inside knowledge. In this day and age, our options need not be limited by convention when it comes to securing that, and I say that’s worth making the most of.

Everyone wants to live on a property with trees on it, right? Wrong. My brother, Robert, is so opposed to the idea that he’s been known to remove a perfect healthy Japanese maple and an adolescent fig tree, just so he ‘doesn’t have to deal with them’. That was his first order of business upon moving in at his current address, and he’s since filled the sites where these specimens stood with turf so luridly green and stiff it might as well be artificial.

That’s Robert’s idea of a garden – just a big expanse of turf, right up to the unobtrusive border that he’s neatly installed along each fence line. These borders are all planted with the same run-of-the-mill hedging plant engineered to provide a low-maintenance edging and screening solution for suburban residential applications. No muss, no fuss. What can I say? Each to their own and all that.

Anyway, Robert is now looking to move up in the property market, and to that end he’s seeking professional assistance in finding a place that meets his tree-free specifications. He told me he’s found himself a buyer’s agent. For properties in Melbourne, it seems, it’s becoming necessary for buyers to have someone on hand whose job it is to judge whether a place is good or not. Or, rather, whether it fits said buyer’s preferences – which don’t necessarily translate to good taste.

That’s what I can’t understand about Robert’s thing with trees. From my perspective, it’s a matter of bad taste, but the weird thing is that he has quite good taste in other areas of his life. He works as a sommelier at a hatted fine-dining joint, for crying out loud, and owns a bokashi bin. Maybe he was traumatised by a tree as a child, although you’d think I’d know about that seeing as I’m the older child. 

Maybe it’s something to do with minimalism? Maybe he enjoys sticking it to carbon sequestration? Or maybe he just likes to be difficult? I don’t know; it’s not my problem.