Buy Buy Baby

Property. Can't afford to buy it, can't afford not to buy it. Actually that makes no sense but you get my drift. We all need somewhere to live but at the moment everything costs so much that renting seems the better option. Except that costs even more.

Actually the main problem with buying property in Perth at the moment is not the prices so much as dealing with the dickhead real estate agents. What qualifications do you actually need to be one?  They all seem to be either cocky, creepy, shifty or a bit slow.  Or a combination of all of the above.  

I've just been to look at a couple of apartments and the guy showing me around, lets call him Jimmy , was about 12 years old, dressed in a flashy yet cheap suit with no tie but still managed to look down his nose at me when I dared to suggest that $535,000 was a bit much for a two bed apartment in Hay Street.  "Well that is the going price at the moment" he sneered.  Well maybe that's the price you have told the vendor it's worth, but seeing as you told me two sentences ago that the vendor is desperate to sell, and that the place has been on the market for "quite a while now", I would suggest that you are asking too much money. Otherwise it would have already sold you burke. 

This is the problem, in WA the agents have had a few spectacularly good years with prices going up and up, with seemingly no end in sight.  Now however THE MARKET HAS CHANGED.  Can't you get that into your thick head?  It's no good telling people their places are worth thousands more than the buyers are willing to pay just because that's what you've done for the last 5 years. 

It's always amazed me that property values are so vague.  How much is it worth? $500,000 Why? Because the agent said so. But WHY? Because that's what all the others places in the area are on the market for? And who decided that? Well..the agent.

We are always told that it is either a buyers market or a sellers market.  I have to say that it is in fact ALWAYS a buyers market.  If nobody paid the price asked, then it wouldn't be worth the price asked!  It's very lucky that human nature just can't resist peer pressure and mass hysteria.  "I must buy because everyone else is buying and if I don't buy I'll never get anything!".  Well you could just wait a few months when the prices settle and the hysteria finishes.  Or if all the buyers waited a few months in the first place, and weren't sucked into the hysteria by the real estate agents and the media, then we might avoid these boom bust scenarios.

Of course in WA we are totally immune from boom bust cycles, they only happen in that mythical land of the Eastern States.  I know that because I've been told by estate agents in the past that "Perth prices are bound to go up..look at the Eastern States" but when prices in the Eastern States go down I've been told, by the same agents "Oh that won't happen here..we're nothing like the Eastern States".  I admit I'm not an economist, I've too much common sense for that, but it does seem odd to me that we can be like another place when things are good, and completely different when things are bad.  

So what am I going to do?  Wait a few months.  So I can buy when the prices go up.