A 1950s retro throwback in Belmont has provided a housing haven for first-home buyers moving in from the Surf Coast.

The mid-century modernist style house at 71 James St sold recently for $647,000 after the seller credited the residence with saving him through Covid lockdowns.

The property was listed with $650,000 to $700,000 price hopes.

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Ray White Highton agent George Politis said the mood in the market improved after the first interest-rate cut in February, but buyers were still wary of houses where they believed they may need to do some structural work.

“There has been a it more positivity in the marketplace since the interest-rate drop,” Mr Politis said.

Mr Politis said it was a good property and interest spiked after the home was featured on a Retro Houses for Sale Facebook page.

“There’s a fair bit of popularity behind those (homes) at the moment,” Mr Politis said.

The first-home buyers were moving in from the coast where homes were less affordable for young purchasers, he said.

The owner bought the property in 2019 when it was billed as ripe for renovation.

But he had other ideas and slowly set about bringing its timber cabinetry and vintage kitchen back to life.

“I’ve always been a fan of retro and the Atomic ranch style and I didn’t think I’d find one in Geelong,” the vendor Ben told the Advertiser previously.

“The big windows, the flat roof, the wooden features – there was a lot of things like shaggy blue carpet that a lot of people would have looked past so I was lucky to be able to get it and during lockdown I had a lot of time not being able to do much so that allowed me to work on it.

“I always say to people I didn’t renovate, I restored it.”

He pulled up the carpets to reveal timber floors, repaired the individual architraves in each room and refreshed the bathroom, still retaining the original curved vanity.

He even kept the separate shower room, rather than turning it into an ensuite.

The post Restored 1950s Belmont home offers haven for first-time buyers appeared first on realestate.com.au.

Weekly pending home sales disappointed in the last week of April, with 10% fewer than the same week in 2024.

To be specific, single-family home sales came in 8% fewer than the same week last year, and condo sales came in 19% fewer. Nationally, weekly pending home sales saw only a small rebound after the Easter holiday from two weeks ago.

It’s not only in the transaction count. Prices looked soft last week too. The median price of the weekly pending sales came in below the same week last year.

That’s the first negative year-over-year reading in nearly two years. This is one week of negative home prices nationally.

One week is not a trend — it could rebound next week — but it is notable that this is the first negative reading after the annual rate of home price change has been slowing all year.

During the week, mortgage rates inched lower, so the typical mortgage payment for a homebuyer is now nearly 6% cheaper than for buyers a year ago. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is still almost 7%, so there is very little incentive for potential buyers sitting on the fence.

Meanwhile, the unsold new listings rate surged in the Northeast this week.

Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all had significant rebounds in new listings after the Easter holiday. These states are where inventory and weekly new listings have remained very constricted. In some cases, the available inventory of unsold homes is still barely above the pandemic crisis shortage levels.

So, a little growth in seller volume in these states is welcome. Stay tuned to see if that trend continues.

Weekly pending home sales

We track every home that takes an offer and goes into contract each week across the country. Homes typically take 30 to 40 days in contract to close the sale. Not every home in contract will close, but this number is a very good proxy for May home sales, which will be in the headlines in a couple of months.

And… home sales were clearly sluggish at the end of April.

We counted only 71,000 new contracts for single-family homes this week. That’s up 4.6% over the previous week, which included the Easter holiday. But it came in 8.7% fewer than the same week in 2024.

In this chart, you can see this year’s purple line has come in under 2024 for a couple of weeks. Two weeks ago included the late Easter holiday, so that’s no surprise. But this week did not rebound nearly as much as I’d expected.

I do think that next week home sales will come in slightly better than 2024. Last year at this time was rough. Mortgage rates were jumping to 7.5%. Starting next week, the year-over-year comparisons get very easy. Also, we have not yet reached the seasonal peak of buying activity. With the late Easter, that peak is probably not until later in May 2025. So, we should see several weeks of increasing transaction counts until the Memorial Day holiday when the market pauses again.

The takeaway for home sales; April started with home sales growth over 2024 but ended with fewer.

May should see mostly more home sales than last year. If next week we see only 72,000 weekly pending home sales, that’d be a bearish signal — and you can be sure I’ll highlight it next Monday. Stay tuned.

Home prices

As I mentioned, the soft data came in not only in transaction volume but also in prices. The median price of the newly pending home sales this week was $395,000.

That was down by 1% for the week, and home prices this week were lower than the same week in 2024.

For the last few years, the story has been that home sales are low, but home prices are still up year-over-year. Home prices kept climbing even as demand weakened to very low levels over the past several years.

Why did home prices keep rising? Well, the supply of homes to buy was still quite restricted. There were very few new listings each week and still restricted levels of unsold inventory nationally.

Now, after three years of rising inventory, we’re finally out of that shortage — but demand hasn’t recovered. So, we’re now at a point where rising supply is great enough to impact prices.

This chart of the weekly pending home sales prices is very useful. You can see how, even in the face of slow sales, the blue line for 2024 prices stayed elevated over 2023. Prices moved higher.

And again, this year, the purple line for 2025 has been every single week all year just a little ahead of last year. But this most recent reading, at the end of April, dipped below last year. Last year the median price of single-family homes newly pending was $399,000. This year it’s $395,000.

As I’ve said before, one week is not a trend. Prices will probably rebound a bit next week, but any negative year-over-year reading in home prices is very unusual. You can see the green line from 2022, when the market was slamming on the brakes — prices adjusted down that year too. So, one week is not a trend, but there’s nothing positive in this reading.

We can get signals with leading indicators of future sales too. The median list price and the price of the new listings both ticked up for the week and are running about 2–3% ahead of last year.

This combination tells us that we’re aiming for zero percent home price change on average across the country. The big thing I’m watching for in home prices is any big shock. For example, mortgage rates spiked with the tariff announcements a month ago, and if that happens again, home prices are very fragile.

Inventory

Home sales are down, so inventory grew by 2% this week — a solid rebound after the Easter holiday.

Even though there are still not a ton of sellers each week in most of the country, slow sales mean that unsold inventory builds.

As I mentioned, the supply of homes on the market is finally ample enough to impact prices. In fact, there are more homes on the market now than at any time since before the pandemic.

We know that inventory has been up across the Sunbelt, but I’m watching the Northeast now to see if that part of the country is finally catching up with some supply. Plus, we have a whole summer of inventory growth still to come. So this story isn’t over.

See the purple line here for the 2025 inventory curve. There are 744,000 single-family homes unsold on the market across the country. That’s 33% more than last year. It’s more than the peak of 2024, which came not until October. It’s more than April of 2020, when due to the pandemic demand boom, inventory started falling rapidly each month.

In this view, it’s very easy to see how we end 2025 with an end to the pandemic shortage that we’ve faced for five years. Time for a new era and new assumptions about the housing market.

New listings

There were 78,000 new listings unsold for single-family homes across the country last week. That’s 10% more than a year ago. So, inventory is building. That was a 12% rebound after the Easter holiday.

But, in fact, it’s actually fewer new listings than I expected. I was looking for 80,000 single-family homes to be newly listed for sale, and we came in at 78,000. I’ll look for 80,000 again in the coming week’s data. I think we could see that 80k threshold for the first time in next week’s data.

New listings rebounded 12%, but sales only rebounded by 5%. And new listings could continue to accelerate. One thing to watch in the new listings data is if the slow sales also put a ceiling on new listings. If I’m not buying a house, I’m not selling my current one.

So, if new listings hit a cap and retreat back to the levels of the last few years, that’s a bearish signal. That’d be not healthy for housing.

In this chart, the purple line of this year’s weekly new listings had been approaching the old normal levels at the top of the chart. The end of April didn’t get to 80,000, and you can see the purple line is sagging down to the set near the bottom of the chart. Let’s see next week if we get some growth.

Compounding with the seller volume is the fact that there are dramatically fewer immediate sales happening now than in recent years. Only 15,000 new listings went into contract immediately after hitting the market at the end of April.

All in all, there were just 1% or so total more sellers than last year at this time. This might be a signal of both buyers and sellers getting chills. Again, if that continues, that’d be an unhealthy sign for housing.

Price reductions

Let’s wrap today looking at the leading indicators. As inventory grew and transactions disappointed, it’s not surprising that we measured a bit of a surge in price cuts at the end of April too.

The percent of homes on the market with price reductions rose 60 basis points to 36.5% of the market. You can see the 2025 line here remains elevated compared to any recent year. This shows us significantly weaker home price pressures than we’ve had since 2022.

Price reductions can change course when demand kicks in. If mortgage rates were to fall like they did in September last year, we would see buyers come off the fence, make offers on homes, and we’d see the uptick in demand flatten this curve out — like in the 2024 blue line later last year. There is no sign of that happening now. This is another way to know that the supply of unsold homes is plenty big to impact prices.

The takeaway on price reductions is that it’s just another data point that reinforces today’s message. Home sales disappointed at the end of April. Sales are down, and prices are down. Consumers are waiting for conditions to improve — and they have not.

That’s all the data we have time for. This market is changing quickly. If you need to be on top of it, I highly recommend that you join us at HousingWire and Altos Research.

It’s been a much loved family home for almost six decades, and showcases of one of SA’s most incredible private antique collections, and now this historic Waterfall Gully home can be yours.

Elder Fine Art founder Jim Elder and his wife Helen bought the stunning 155 Waterfall Gully Rd, Waterfall Gully property 57 years ago while they were in their twenties, and now, with them both in their eighties, Mr Elder says it is time to say goodbye to the place they have loved calling home.

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“We’d just started the business when my wife and myself were in our early 20s and then that was our first home, one might say,” he said.

“It was built in the 1880s and it was in very sound condition and when you’re 26 you’re adventurous.

“We’ve done a lot of work there over the years and it’s been a joy to live there.

“I’m in my 83rd year and my wife’s 80. We’ve been putting off selling it because we just love the area so much and we’ve brought all our children up there – we’ve had their 21st birthdays up here, family weddings and so many get-togethers with our friends over the years.

“But time moves on.”

While the property is being sold as a grand 10-bedroom homestead, that’s not how it started.

“It was used as a guesthouse in the early days and I believe it was a hotel up to the 1930s,” Mr Elder says.

“During the last war, it was an R&R place for American soldiers.

“Going back in the early days there was a big orchard there and a lot of land was joined to that particular property.

“The building that you’re seeing now was built in I think about 1880

“In the early days when the settlement of Adelaide I think it was a tavern – you’ve got to remember that was a day’s trip by buggy from the CBD out to there and you had the beautiful waterfall at the end of the road, and that was picnic spot for the colonial settlers in South Australia.”

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The home, which is set over two grand levels, offers a massive 969sqm of indoor and outdoor living space and has a formal dining room, a cellar, a spacious family room, a studio, stables, a swimming pool, a tennis court, a barbecue hut, a spa and plenty of space for off-road parking.

While the property has provided some fantastic memories they will take with them, with their family having moved out and it just being the two of them there, the time has come to say goodbye to Waterfall Gully and embark on the exciting next step of their journey together.

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“It’ll be the saddest day of my life when we move out of there, but as you know, there’s a time to hold them and a time to fold them, and regrettably for us, this is the time that we have to move on,” Mr Elder says.

Mr Elder says the couple have yet to find another place to live, but it’s safe to say it will be significantly smaller.

“We’ll probably rent for a while until we find a nice house to relax in, that will allow me to maybe take my fishing rod out again,” Mr Elder said.

And as for their antiquities collection? Mr Elder says that will not be going with the couple.

“We’ll properly have an auction on site of all the goods that we don’t plan on taking with us,” Mr Elder says.

“No, we won’t be looking at formulating a collection of antiques and art at 83 years old.”

The property is on the market through Jamie Brown of Booth Real Estate for $3.9m to $4.29m, with offers closing Tuesday May 27 at noon.

The post Art and antiquities legend Jim Elder sells Waterfall Gully home of almost 60 years appeared first on realestate.com.au.

An international real estate mogul has weighed in on the debate over solutions to Australia’s housing crisis, slamming a ‘mansion tax’ and calling for interest rates to be slashed.

Speaking from Los Angeles ahead of his visit Downunder to headline this year’s Australasian Real Estate Conference (AREC), Mauricio Umansky also said government incentives for private sector developers would help boost housing supply.

“Governments need to subsidise the private sector,” he said. “In LA, for example, the government is wanting to control housing for the homeless because they don’t want the private sector to make money off it.

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“The government is more worried about the private sector profiting from the homeless than giving them housing.”

The founder and CEO of The Agency — a billion-dollar real estate brokerage based in the United States — will speak to thousands of real estate professionals at the two-day conference, from May 25 to 26.

Umansky’s visit Downunder comes during a “perfect storm” of housing unaffordability — high mortgage rates, high prices, and low supply, which he says is being felt all over the world.

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“I think governments need to lower interest rates, period,” he said. “If you lower interest rates, you end up with higher supply and unlock inventory owned by people who are holding on to their properties.

“Two things will occur — lower interest rates will make (housing) more affordable, and higher inventory will lower prices.”

But while policymakers in Australia have floated similar ideas to Los Angeles’ ‘mansion tax’, in a bid to tackle housing affordability, Umansky says that’s not the answer.

“(The mansion tax) has reduced transactions so much,” he said. “We’re ending up with a much lower amount of … revenue. Instead of raising revenue, it is lowering it. It’s an absolute disaster.”

The reality TV star said he was “super excited” to visit the Gold Coast and share his strategies on high-end deal-making, branding in a digital age, and the evolving expectations of property buyers and sellers at AREC.

“I’ve been to Sydney, but not the Gold Coast,” he said. “I’ve heard it’s very California-esque. I think it’s an exciting market.”

Renowned for his role on Netflix’s Buying Beverly Hills and frequent appearances on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Umansky has built a formidable reputation in luxury real estate, with clients ranging from celebrities to Fortune 500 executives — and even Hugh Hefner.

He cites selling the Playboy mansion for $100m in 2016 as his most defining deal to date.

While he has no plans to expand The Agency downunder just yet, he hasn’t written off a Buying Sydney spin-off.

“I wouldn’t say no,” he said. “I’m giving you a one-year plan right now, so in the next year, no.”

Umansky’s personal life has been a hot topic in the tabloids in recent months — being snapped in public with a number of women since his high-profile split from “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Kyle Richards, but he doesn’t let the gossip get to him.

“I ignore the drama of the TV world and basically concentrate on my job,” Umansky said. “There are so many phallacies out there. Unfortunately tabloids and magazines only sell on stories that are destroying people.”

But maintaining a global brand digitally and running his own social media accounts are important to him.

“I definitely use (Instagram) — it’s my voice. I just ignore the noise. It’s a wonderful thing (for agents to use) to grow your persona and brand.

“When you’re talking about how do I deal with TV and the tabloids and the BS, Instagram is where I get to have my say.”

The 54-year-old has been hitting the gym to get his shoulder strength back more than two months after breaking his clavicle in an Aspen skiing accident.

“I love sports,” he said. “Skiing is my favourite thing to do, but I’d love to learn how to surf. Teach me how to surf!”

And, if you’re wondering what the secret is to his stamina:

“I sleep with the drapes open, so I wake up with the sun. I’ve never put on an alarm clock, even for an airplane.”

In a statement, AREC founder John McGrath said Umansky’s attendance reflected the event’s growing global appeal.

“Mauricio is a powerhouse in the industry — not just for the deals he’s done, but for how he’s transformed real estate into a lifestyle brand,” McGrath said.

“He’s redefining what it means to be a modern agent, and we’re thrilled to bring his insights to the Australian and New Zealand markets.”

Alongside Umansky, this year’s AREC lineup includes a mix of local and international speakers including US presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.

Now in its 26th year, AREC continues to draw real estate professionals from across Australasia, offering sessions on sales tactics, marketing innovation, prop tech trends, and personal development.

The post Celebrity real estate mogul’s Aussie housing crisis fix appeared first on realestate.com.au.

A neighbour row over a strip of land just 3cm across has left a family facing “death threats” from locals.

Darren and Debbie White have been locked in a bitter dispute with the Alder family in Chelmsford, Essex, since 2016.

The court battle started when the White family demolished a boundary wall to make room for a garden home for their son.

They claimed the wall separating their properties was structurally unsafe and “wonky”.

The Whites built a replacement wall, which was described as “straight” by Mrs White.

However, it extended about one inch further than the original structure.

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And unknown to the family, the previous owners of the two cottages had created a boundary agreement in 2005.

The Alders took legal action against the Whites in September 2020 as a result.

They said the Whites had damaged their property and built on their land.

The Court of Appeal upheld the boundary agreement this month.

The court found the boundary agreement created by the previous owners was valid.

It is also binding on the current owners of the houses – even without their knowledge of the agreement.

But Mrs White claimed they had received planning permission to build the outhouse in 2012.

The Whites are now facing more than AUD $200,000 in legal costs after losing their court case.

“I go to bed every night and I don’t want to wake up,” Mrs White told the Mail.

“I’ve just been signed off work for two weeks with severe stress. I’m on the maximum amount of antidepressants.”

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She also said they received death threats from unknown parties during the dispute, claiming that a male stranger came to her door and threatened to shoot her husband over the boundary row.

There is no indication the Alders were connected to this alleged incident.

“We had threats to our lives,” she added. “You shouldn’t be threatened with murder on your doorstep.”

Mrs White said the family will now be forced to sell their home to cover the legal costs.

Her husband is currently in hospital with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis.

The Alder family refused to comment when approached by media.

The post How fence dispute sparked $200k neighbour battle appeared first on realestate.com.au.