Thought I'd give this Forum Topic a bit of a bump, and coincide it with a vent. I know @Strawman loves a property rant - I largely agree with his stance and views on property having listened to him in my ears for a good couple of hours each weekend when I listen to the MF Pod machine. Anyway here is my pay back, just let me climb on top of my soap box...

My wife and I are a good 10 months into our property hunt/drama, we've placed offers on a few properties to date, missing the mark marginally on all occasions.The most recent offer we placed was on a small 3x3; some of the events that have occurred since placing the offer are nothing short of comical.

The property is listed as an 'End Date Sale', essentially a blind/silent auction until the 'end date', which funnily enough was yesterday (26/03). All offers are submit via an application 'RESO' through to the agent who then passes these offers onto the owners "at 5pm on the 26th". The advertisement advises that "the owners can accept any offer at their own discretion prior to the due date" - so if some heavy-hitter comes up to the plate and whacks down a cash offer too good to pass up. Anyway, fortunately for us that didn't eventuate on this occasion, my wife and I attended a home open and tried to gauge interest (and value) in the property. Now we are pretty savvy, we've got a number of reports from CoreLogic and other providers and have our own fair value of what we think this is worth. We managed to corner the agent at the home open and advised of what we thought a fair-value range would be, and asked where this may put us against other offers.

Never have I seen someone dodge questions so well, this agent was like a double-jointed 12-year old playing high school dodgeball. Not only did he simply not answer these questions, he told us to "put in your best and final-offer within the app", this is the same agent that has gives out a flyer saying "there is no price range for the property, we let the market decide the value". Now I get the idea letting "the market decide", but imagine wanting to buy a single security/stock but the price is never displayed until it is bought by the highest bidder, and once it is bought, you cannot buy in and need to wait for it to go 'on-market' again only for the current value the market is placing on it to vanish; it's frustrating to say the least. I believe this only compounds the housing affordability issue, placing a sense of anxiety on the buyer to keep upping their price, and hence - pushing up prices in a heavily supply-constrained market.

It gets better, at the home open, the agent advised that there was 2 offers currently in prior to ours. Come 26/03 (yesterday) and we get a call from the agent, saying our offer has "two better offers ahead of it - are you willing to up your price?", I reply "well that depends on a range of factors, so how much would we be needing to up our offer to be competitive", the agent then states "oh, I cannot give you that information - I just need you to put in your best revised offer".... Anyway I get it - it's all part of the game. We decide not to put in a higher offer, we were stretched as is. Come this morning expecting to find out a result of how we went I received a message from the agent: "Dear buyer, the seller has not had a chance to review the offers for location #####". Now call me cynical, but it's hard not to see this as another strategy to try and squeeze more out of final buyers who are likely competing on price. If however, it is the sellers not having a chance to have reviewed the offer, well, then YOU HAD ONE JOB.

To conclude, the agent called me up late this afternoon and advised we were unsuccessful, our offer was "too standard" (lol, thanks m8), and the property had 8 offers in total, and went for >$100k above our offer which was above the high end valuation estimate of all the reports we reviewed.

How good is property and being a buyer in the market today.... *shakes fist at sky*.

Will be interesting to see the effects of the boomer generation moving on to the next place....inheritance tsunami.....avalanche....or whatever other phrase they will no doubt coin for it...

Loads of wrinkles to it.

For example...what will happen to house prices in the suburbs where 50% plus of residents are retired.....

Doesn't seem to have captured the fascination of the media zeitgeist yet... it's a bit morbid I guess.

God please don’t let it be inflationary !

Through the looking glass

A quick update on our property saga.

So after the post-pre-approval-disapproval debacle, our broker went out to find some other lenders. As part of their due diligence each lender wanted to undertake a valuation of the property.

The 50-page valuation report conducted the previous week by an independent valuer, the one contracted by the first lender, and that delivered a valuation that was EXACTLY the same as the market price, would not suffice. They each wanted to do their own.

OK, sure, why not. It's madness, but I just need to get this thing sorted.

But here's the wild part: one of the valuers was THE EXACT SAME PERSON who conducted the original valuation only a week earlier.

And, it's not like they just changed the letterhead on the report. I'd at least understand the grift if it was a simple copy/paste, tick and flick.

No, they actually asked the agent if they could go out again to look at the property a second time.

The good news is that it looks like we will get it over the line. That's what I've been led to expect at least, so fingers crossed!

But talk about a distraction. I've got a lot of catching up to do on ASX matters, so appreciate what everyone has been sharing.

For anyone looking for a good laugh, go and check out the cashflow profiles on the properties listed on BrickX (https://www.brickx.com/). It's unbelievable that some of these properties trade at their "valuation" and that the manager can still flog these financial products to retail investors with high fixed investment management fees. The most amazing thing is that every 5 years there's a vote to see whether investors want to sell and wind up each trust...but investors either don't vote or vote against selling....

Here's a screenshot of the most egregious examples I found: