One of the country’s most well-known mansions will be raffled in a shock twist.

Dune, in Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast, sold in an off-market $12m deal in March – the re-sale price smashed the previous $11m record, also set by Dune, for a house in Burleigh Heads.

Now, it can be revealed the buyer was Dream Home Art Union, previously known as RSL Art Union.

The group markets themselves as “Australia’s biggest prize home lottery” and is set to offer Dune as part of a prize package.

“It really is a dream come true for someone to win the Dream Home Art Union, and we’re looking forward to bringing the next level in dream homes, including the Dune property, to our valued supporters,” said RSL Queensland CEO Robert Skoda.

“This property cements the Dream Home Art Union as continuing to have Australia’s biggest prize home line-up while providing care, commemoration and camaraderie to veterans and their families now and into the future.”

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Dream Home Art Union confirmed tickets for Dune will start from $5.

Real estate agent Ed Cherry of Coastal handled the latest $12m Dune deal but would not comment on the buyer.

“It’s an iconic sale for Burleigh Heads based on the architecture and it’s definitely added hype to Burleigh Hill,” Mr Cherry said.

“Burleigh has always had its key sales that really elevate the area but the buzz is still here and this sale is a testament to that.”

The seller was fitness entrepreneur Adam Sullivan, of Evidence Based Training.

Mr Sullivan bought Dune from Rob Gray of developer Graya, whose team designed the five-bedroom, Moroccan-inspired home featuring a rooftop pool.

“I was really excited when I found out who bought it and what they have planned for it,” Mr Gray said.

Rob and his wife Meghan bought the 531sq m block on Burleigh Hill for $2.78m in June 2022, when they decided to expand Graya’s apartment development business into the Gold Coast.

The post How $12m ‘Dune’ mansion could be yours for $5 appeared first on realestate.com.au.

An unliveable cottage in a major Aussie city has sold sight unseen for $1.5 million, complete with caution tape across its entrance.

Located in the sought-after suburb of Auchenflower in Brisbane, the delapidated home on a 574sq m block was sold at auction by the Public Trustee on May 9.

The listing warned that no internal inspections were premitted due to the state of the house, with photos showing a precarious front staircase and wire fencing with caution tape.

“This circa-1920s character cottage sits on an elevated 574sq m block in the heart of Auchenflower,” the listing says.

“This position offers the best of both worlds, leafy suburban living just minutes from the city.”

It features high ceilings throughout and original VJs;, but the house is in “desperate need of some love and attention”.

It features four bedrooms, an original kitchen, bathroom and undercroft area that would house one car.

“The opportunity is there for you to renovate, raise or extend all subject to the right Council approvals,” the listing says, noting it is character zoned.

“You simply have to look at the neighbouring properties for ideas and inspiration of what this amazing home could become,” the listing says.

In other words, the house cannot be demolished so its new owners have their work cut out to get the residence back to a habitable state.

The kitchen features cobwebs and manky floors, as does the bathroom, which has looks like its very own biohazard.

The carpet in the bedrooms and living areas must go, while the blackened ceilings pose their own challenges.

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But in a competitive market, where the median house price in Auchenflower is $1,677,500, up 11.8 per cent in 12 months and 53.9 per cent since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no shortage of buyers.

Recent sales in Auchenflower include a four bedroom home on a 408sq m block which sold for $1.35 million in April, and a three bedroom character Queenslander which sold for $1.725 million in March.

Both were in much better condition that the delapidated cottage.

Auchenflower is a riverside suburb and one of Brisbane’s most tightly-held locations just 4km to the CBD.

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Popular online and in-person, people were lining up to secure this 1960s home in Howrah.

And one lucky purchaser will soon be able to put their stamp on the property.

No.33 Elinga St, Howrah was listed for sale with Fall Real Estate, priced at “Offers over $685,000”.

It zoomed to the top of realestate.com.au’s most-viewed Tassie homes’ chart, and it attracted big crowds when available to inspect.

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In a result that mirrored Hobart’s most-recent boom market, the home was sold in mere days.

Fall Real Estate agent Justin Parr said the strong result came down to a combination of factors: a strategic marketing campaign, accurate pricing, and the power of the agency’s buyer network and social media, “all working together to highlight the home’s character, views, and great location”.

“We had an incredible response,” he said.

“Over 100 people came through the first and only open home, followed by nine private inspections, and 11 written offers.

“The property sold within just four days, which really speaks to how well the campaign connected with the right audience.”

Mr Parr said nailing the price is an absolute must.

“Our pricing strategy was key to this outcome, as it allowed the home to appeal to a broad pool of buyers — including first-home buyers, investors, young families, and renovators,” he said.

“Interestingly, we also saw strong interest from downsizers looking to put their own stamp on the property.”

No.33 has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, alongside multiple living spaces.

Located just steps from Howrah Beach, the position allows views stretching from Bruny Island across the Derwent River to kunanyi/Mt Wellington and the Hobart CBD.

There are oak floors, a wood heater, soaring ceilings, a deck and a master bedroom with built-in wardrobes.

The lower level is home to a rumpus room, laundry and workshop.

The post ‘Incredible’: Tassie’s most-popular home is already sold appeared first on realestate.com.au.

The weekly pending home sales picked up this week as expected, with 2.6% more pending home sales contracts started than a year ago.

If you’re following the data closely, you know that home sales are still running at or below last year’s pace. Year to date, through the first week of May, we count 3% fewer total sales than in 2024. But in May and June, the yearly comparisons get easier because last year at this time was really dry due to the highest mortgage rates of the year.

So the next bunch of weeks should each report home sales growth.

What’s interesting is that if we look just at the mortgage applications data — meaning how many potential homebuyers are applying for a mortgage to buy a house — this data has been running well ahead of 2024 since February.

The Mortgage Bankers Association‘s Purchase Mortgage Index is usually a very good gauge of home purchase volume. But this year, it seems there have been more people applying for mortgages but the same level or fewer people buying houses.

On Friday, HousingWire ran a story with some lenders reporting that last Tuesday was their biggest application day in three years. What’s going on?

Well, it could be a shift away from cash buyers. In the last few years, as mortgage rates rose, we saw an increase in the percentage of deals that were done in all cash. So it could be fewer deals overall but more mortgages being used. Or, it could also be just an indication of pent-up demand. There are plenty of folks who have delayed their purchase decisions for several years, and maybe they’re tired of waiting. If that’s the case, that’s a bullish indicator for home sales in the next couple of months.

Though, I confess, I’m not super bullish.

As I’ve said frequently, May and June should show year-over-year home sales gains over 2024. It’d be nice to see that happen. The risk for this market is that mortgage rates could go higher from here. Even as the stock market has rebounded, the bond market has kept rates high.

That affordability problem can’t be denied. Stay tuned for the next few week to see if we can grow home sales over 2024. I think the next couple of weeks will indeed report sales growth.

Let’s dive into the housing data for the first full week of May 2025.

Weekly pending home sales

Home sales ticked up, as expected, this week. We counted 74,000 newly pending home sales for the week. That’s up 4.5% from a week prior and is 2.6% more sales than the same week a year ago.

As I’ve said, look for May and June to see year-over-year gains in home sales from 2024 because sales were very weak last summer.

You can see the sales drop-off in this chart. 2024 is the blue line. See how it dips right as the purple 2025 line crosses now?

Home sales peaked for the calendar year 2024 in early May at just under 78,000 weekly pending home sales. You can see the spike here in blue too. The biggest week last year was 78,000 single-family sales in a week, and that happened right at the beginning of May.

Mortgage rates at that time surged to 7.5%, and homebuyers walked away. So last year, home sales started moving lower. In most years, though, the weekly home sales tend to max out sometime later in June. So this year we still have more room for growth.

There hasn’t been any catastrophic economic news in a few weeks, and mortgage rates have been stable. Rates are not falling, but at least the 30-year fixed rate is under 7% and doesn’t seem to be going much higher for now. So if things stay on this pace, we should expect the next couple of weeks for home sales to climb.

To show growth in home sales for the rest of May, we don’t need a new boom — we just need things not to collapse. Fingers crossed. By the way, condo sales are a lot weaker than single-family, and condo sales are still running well behind 2024 levels.

Inventory

On to the supply side of the equation. There are now 756,000 single-family homes unsold on the market around the country. That’s 33% more than last year at this time and up 1.6% for the week.

That’s not a huge jump for May. There are 11,000 more single-family homes on the market now than a week ago.

Unsold inventory is steadily approaching the old normal levels that we used to have pre-pandemic. There were only 11% more homes unsold on the market at this point in May 2018 than there are now.

In this chart, each line is a year. The purple line for 2025 keeps climbing north to the old levels. The green line is 2018. 2018 was a rising interest rate year, and inventory rose also that year. You can see the green line of 2018 finished with more unsold homes on the market than 2017 or 2019.

Inventory continues to build. Even if sales inch higher, inventory is building faster. That’s keeping a lid on prices. We’ll get to prices in a minute.

New listings

Still on the supply side, we need to look at new listings volume. We finally hit 80,000 new unsold listings. This is a threshold we’ve been talking about for a few weeks.

For several years — since the end of the pandemic boom three years ago — the defining characteristic of this housing market has been how few sellers there are. That’s finally changing. Think about home sales: it’s hard to get 80,000 home sales in a week if there are only 70,000 sellers. We’ve been in a supply-constrained market. But now, pretty definitively, the seller volume is picking up each week, and that’s one thing that enables sales to increase too.

In addition to those 80,000 unsold new listings, there were 15,000 immediate sales. These are new listings that go immediately into contract and don’t add to the active inventory. That’s the fewest immediate sales for early May that we’ve seen since we’ve been tracking. It wasn’t that long ago when there were 30,000 immediate sales in a given week. Now there are only 15,000.

Immediate sales happen in every market — the best homes priced right get offers immediately. But when buyers don’t have urgency, there are fewer bidding wars and fewer immediate sales.

In fact, immediate sales fell off a cliff last year at this time. Immediate sales, remember, are when the homes get listed and go into contract essentially immediately. When demand weakens, immediate sales don’t happen. As those immediate sales fell, so did total sales. So we can gauge the demand shift in May 2024 in both of these metrics.

This is a chart of the new listings and the immediate sales. Each bar is a week. The taller the bar, the more sellers came to market that week. You can see now, at the right end of the chart, there are more new listings each week than there have been in several years.

Home prices

Even though purchase volumes may be inching higher, the supply of homes on the market is moving faster. As a result, the median price of this week’s pending home sales came in at $399,900.

That’s below 2024 for the second week in a row. Now, it’s just a tiny fraction below last year. Prices will cluster around $400,000, so it’s not a surprise that the price is very close to last year.

Still, two weeks in a row where the sales price nationally is slightly below a year prior. You can see that here in the purple line just a hair below the 2024 blue line.

Most years, of course, home prices increase around 5% each year. This is because we have a generally growing economy, a growing population, a little inflation, and we tend to underbuild homes. So the nominal growth in home prices tends to be about 5% annually. A flat year in home prices is pretty unusual.

A down year — when home prices end lower than the year prior — is very unusual.

2025, as of right now, has unchanged home price appreciation averaged nationally compared to 2024. Home prices are flat year over year. Depending on a few variables like mortgage rates and macroeconomic trends, where inventory keeps climbing, home prices could end 2025 lower than 2024.

One interesting note in the home price data is that list prices are appreciating a little faster than pending sales prices. That’s because more expensive homes are taking longer to sell. The median list price is 2% above last year at $460,000. There is a growing disparity between the list and pending sales prices. None of the data shows home price strength, of course.

Price reductions

As we switch to the leading indicators of future sales prices, the percentage of homes on the market with price reductions ticked up by 30 basis points this week to 36.8%.

After a few weeks of stability in this metric, it has recently started climbing again. You can see that the purple line for 2025 remains at the highest level in years, meaning more of the homes on the market now are unsold and have taken a price reduction from the original list price.

You can also see the green line here from 2022. Demand and price conditions were deteriorating rapidly at that time. Each week, a lot more folks were cutting prices. That’s not happening now. Demand is still light. Supply is still climbing. So a fair number of sellers don’t get the offer they want, and they cut their asking price to stimulate demand.

The takeaway from the price reductions data now is that even though we’ll probably report home sales growth in May and June, that’s partly because we have a lot more homes available to buy.

If we actually saw a demand increase, that would translate into fewer price cuts. You can see the demand changes in this trendline very quickly. See it in the blue line last September — it took a significant drop in mortgage rates to get that shift in market demand. We don’t have that now.

Devotees of Mid-Century architecture are proving to be large in number and deep in pocket with a classic Highton home selling for more than $100,000 above price hopes.

The three top bidders for a four-bedroom Mid-Century classic selling for the first time in Highton’s Reigate Rd were in the industry, with the two underbidders both architects, McGrath, Geelong agent Tom Harrison said after Saturday’s auction.

The two-storey home at 66 Reigate Rd sold for $960,000 after five bidders raised a hand for the residence designed by Walter Hodgson, built by his family and selling for the first time since 1964.

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Mr Harrison said after a slow start, the competition for the home intensified at the auction called by McGrath Geelong director David Cortous.

And once contracts were signed, the family and buyers continued chatting about what’s next for the beautifully presented mid century residence.

“It was going to be popular just based on the rarity of it and we ended up having five groups put their hand up,” Mr Harrison said.

The number one reason for the home’s popularity was its mid-century architecture, he said.

“The best two of three auctions we’ve had have been mid-century homes. Both campaigns had 100-plus groups through.

“It’s just that style, and with this one the facade was super-unique with floor to ceiling windows the whole way across, a triple garage underneath and a double carport at the back. And it was Reigate Rd.”

Mr Harrison said the buyers first saw the property while it was featured on a mid century architecture Instagram page.

“That’s where they first saw it, then they go on realestate.com and just got all that exposure because it was super unique. The green carpet, the straw ceiling and the cool story behind it.”

The untouched mid century was a true time capsule which the original owner’s family pitched in to finish while he was away overseas is selling for the first time in Highton.

The custom 1964 house was designed by local architect Walter Hodgson, who was also responsible for Belmont’s Buena Vista motel.

Mr Harrison said the buyers don’t expect to change much.

“They just want to modernise what they need to and keep the rest,” he said.

The beautifully preserved interior avoids artificial materials, instead showcasing natural materials such as the pressed straw ceiling, solid blackwood internal doors and alpine ash walls.

The owner’s son said the house was a labour of love for his engineer father who spent several months working in Mexico during the build but stayed intensively involved through long, detailed letters.

He said his parents were attracted to the elevated site’s panoramic views over Geelong and the opportunity to incorporate a large garage space where they could restore vintage cars.

The original kitchen retains ceiling-mounted cabinetry and floor-to-ceiling windows across both the front and back of the house remain.

The family member said a carport had been added for ease of access but nothing had changed inside apart from the hardwood floors now being carpeted.

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