Posts by Cate Bakos

As the real estate year comes to a close, I circle in on the Victorian property market and ponder the highlights, lowlights, surprising trends and I ask myself what could be in store for our capital city and regional markets next year. Melbourne, along with Sydney and Canberra had a challenging year with protracted lockdowns,…

According to the media, yes…. but I think not. There is much more to measuring the peak of the market than auction clearance rates. We are experiencing a tiny window of eased buying conditions, and when we take a careful look at the data, the story becomes quite clear…. The planets have aligned perfectly this…

Back in 2011 I met a young prospective investor at a first home buyer event I participated in alongside a lovely industry buddy. Steve Cruz and I teamed up and ran a series of small seminars over a few weeknights for buyers who were keen to explore the idea of property investing or home-buying. The…

We’ve been writing weekly blogs for over a decade now and in this time, we’ve documented trends, various clients’ property adventures, our coal face insights and market updates. From the lows of the 2012 and 2019 market to the highs of our 2013-2017 run, the credit-squeezed pre-May 2019 period to the turbulence throughout COVID lockdowns……

This week’s blog is delivered following popular demand. Many consumers misunderstand the interest rate news right now, and there are two common elements that are getting confused; interest rate increases: currently only fixed rates, not variable rates increased buffer rates, as initiated recently by APRA Back to the first point…. So many people are feeling…

We get to enjoy so many exciting journeys with our clients. Many come to us for assistance because the task of finding a home can feel daunting or overwhelming. A large proportion of our clients are first time buyers, yet even for those who are upgrading, the enormity of the task can often trigger these…

I recently listened to a great documentary on ABC National radio’s Ockham’s Razor. A marine science expert, Paul Hardisty spoke about the plight of saving the Great Barrier Reef. “Every day we make hundreds of choices, big and small, that build to become the story of our lives – the friends we make, the careers…

Every few weeks I chat with an industry buddy, quantity surveyor – Mike Mortlock. We enjoy analysing data; and more so, I like distilling the numbers with Mike and shedding light on what’s happening at the coal face to trigger the data that he’s produced. Mike is an industry thought leader who has recently produced…

I’ve written a lot about off-market properties because they are a popular, but often misunderstood concept. Selling agents sometimes mislabel them, a lot of buyer’s agents use them in their advertising spiel, and plenty of buyers fall prey to non-quality or over-priced off-markets. It’s unfair, though to suggest that there aren’t some great off-market opportunities…