Businesses of Beecroft

Ray White is a founding member of the Businesses of Beecroft organisation, and is hosting that organisation's blog, at www.businessesofbeecroft.blogspot.com.

Douglas Knows Best

A testimonial from the owners of the house sold at auction last week:
"Although we would have liked to have sold prior to the auction it is now obvious that Douglas knew best".
This followed a long drawn out auction with bids going up $1K at a time and the auctioneer Ben Mathews refusing to give up.

State of the Market (2)

In my last blog I reported how newspapers say interest in house purchase is fading. Yet over the last week we had our largest number of visitors to our site (raywhitebeecroft.com.au) in eight months! Of these, 40% were new visitors, and they spent an average of over four page views per visit.
Of course a lot of these visitors would have been perusing our rental properties as opposed to sales, the rental market is sizzling and we are renting more properties each week than we have done in a long time.

State of the Market

According to Stephen Nicholls of the SMH, Sydney's property market has suddenly caught a cold! Auction clearance rates in the past two weeks have been down, and agents report fewer visitors to open houses.
However Ray White Beecroft sold 30 Lyndon Way at auction on Saturday,

and 14A The Crescent was sold prior to auction the night before after some fast footwork by Peter Raco.

Even more incredible we had 45 groups through a new listing at 15 Wandeen Avenue Beecroft, a beautiful old house that was due to go to auction on 12 June. However we have 14 contracts out on the property so Douglas is thinking of bringing the auction forward a week.

Should be an interesting auction!

Land Tax increase

The NSW Minister for Land quietly mentioned a new land tax, buried in a document about security of land transfer documents. Applicable on sales above $500,000, the rate will be 0.2% for the value above that amount, up to $1M, and then 0.25% for value above that larger amount. As an example a $1.2M house will attract an extra $1,500 land tax. The tax will be introduced so the revenue can be counted in the June 8 state budget.
It might be an incentive to close a sale quickly, although not knowing when the tax will apply makes it hard to know if you can avoid it.