kaulat

Apologies, I'm unable to post at the moment. Will return in October.

Craven opportunism knows no bounds. And in the midst of equity market routs you can almost set your watch to it. A real estate agent, no doubt with AFSL in hand, blabbering about how an equity market downturn will be good for real estate. In this instance, reader Robert dropped me a line with a nice scan attached of today's Advocate. It featured Devonport real estate agent, Alan Halliwell (a regular source of Advocate talent who previously disagreed there was any large amount of empty properties around). Al-Hal was super keen to offer those ever accurate indicators of "investors are looking" and "inquiries at my agency are high." Al-Hal also offered some lessons in real estate as a hedge against inflation and how real estate will always outperform money in the bank. He rounded out reminding sellers there was a bit of stock on the market and they couldn't afford to be greedy. Of course, being little more than a craven opportunist myself, I decided to test Al...

On Friday as managers, planners and brokers across the country were fielding calls from distraught investors and close to retirement boomers fearing a future diet of Pedigree, a North-West Tasmanian real estate office was offering advice contrary to their equity market slinging cousins - Jump! While the equity market message was "don't panic and sell (I can't afford to lose more clients)", the message coming from Saunders Property suggested they'd rounded up some confused vendors and their stale listings for a dose of reality - "get out now, or it will be a bigger hit later." Nearly 20 properties were stamped with "Clearance Price", having their prices adjusted downwards and towards reality. From the meagre and less realistic - a 4k discount on the ultra-modern and obnoxious, to the bone jarring - 140k slashed from a tea and scone property with acreage. Almost 650k, for an average of over 35k per property was lit up, with embers of housing equi...

In more productive times this blog was churning out a respectable number of posts, was exposing spruikers, had a dollop of research and made a couple of funnies along the way. I was providing a service to the community I told myself - but then it stopped being easy. The daily hits stopped accelerating and the traffic gains stopped coming. I thought I'd hit a permanently high plateau, but then traffic started falling. I thought this blog would be different, but now the gains aren't coming like they used to, so what can I really achieve from this? When things were riding high I really thought I'd be in the game for the long-term, but now I'd be better off doing something else with my time. But the humiliation, no I can't quit, I'm a long-termer. I dunno maybe it was just the wrong time to get into blogging, but I read blogging goes in cycles, oh christ, what have I done?  Yes, while comparable to the sloppy property investor letting one of his 'community servi...