Category: Property
  • Nicola Ellis, Property

Affordable Housing Help

In a time of rising construction costs, plummeting home building activity and increasing demand, the Housing Availability and Affordability (Planning and Other Legislation Amendment) Act 2024 was passed through Parliament in April 2024, amending the Planning Act 2016 to hopefully streamline and facilitate affordable residential development throughout the state.
  • Nicola Ellis, Property

Cautious Steps

“The new Body Corporate and Community Management and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2023, introduced in recent weeks by Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath, has got plenty of prospective property developers more than a little excited.”
  • Nicola Ellis, Property, Wills and Estates

The Fine Detail

As anyone can tell you, the property market is going absolutely gangbusters right now. So much so that a bidder at an auction in Sydney’s south last Saturday accidently bid against herself just as she was about to be declared the new owner of the property for sale at the hotly-contested auction. The final price was $1.62 million, with her previous bid being $1.619 million. The underbidder’s last offer was $1.618 million.
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion, Property

Boom Town

When I was a kid my brothers and I used to watch those corny old black-and-white midday matinee movies on TV, and one of my favourites was an action adventure called “Boom Town”. It starred Clark Gable and Spencer Tracey as “Big John” Masters and “Square John” Sands, a couple of handsome wildcatters chancing their luck on the California oil fields. Together they carve out an empire in a rollicking western town where the saloons are overflowing with cowboys and dancing girls, and everyone is prospecting for something.
  • Chris Nyst, International, Opinion, Property, Travel

The Winds Of Change

What goes around comes around, I guess. My wife and I spent this week visiting our youngest daughter at her home in Brooklyn, New York City, where we rubbed shoulders with the beautiful people on the borough’s trendy Bedford Avenue. How times have changed.
  • Property

Party Time – Regulating The Party House

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the suburbs… Earlier this year, eight years after he made national headlines when the party he threw at his parents’ suburban home was overrun by hundreds of gatecrashers who responded to a MySpace invitation, Corey Worthington, now 23 and all grown up, has launched his latest business venture — an online party planning service, would you believe.
  • Brendan Nyst, Property

Supreme Court Rules Incentive Clawbacks Unenforceable

What goes up must come down, and vice versa. In a town that’s seen more than its share of booms and busts, landlords understand the concept all too well. In this town, when the cold winds of the economic winter blow, you cut your cloth to meet the market. If capturing a plum tenant means gifting them a rent-free period, or even shelling out for a fancy fit out, so be it. What you lose on the swing, you pick up on the merry-go-round. Or do you?
  • Chris Nyst, Opinion, Politics, Property

Why Higher Residential Density Makes Sound Socio-Economic Sense

Picture: Dmitry Osipenko Established in 2008, the Grattan Institute is a Melbourne-based public policy think tank which focuses on the key policy areas of Cities, Energy, Health, Schools Education, Higher Education and Productivity. With the help of funding from the Australian Federal Government, the State Government of Victoria, the University of Melbourne and BHP Billiton, it draws on research and expertise drawn from a broad range of fields to formulate high quality evidence-based public policy for Australia’s future. In its most recent report the Institute argues that for both social and economic reasons we have to find ways either to enable our workers to live closer to Australia's CBDs, or to reach them more quickly and effectively by road and public transport. The report is posted on the internet, and is worth a read.