Buyer's Guide to Rose Bay (NSW)
Robert Terley is born and bred Eastern Suburbs and has been servicing the area for six years.
Better yields with apartments
Houses are not concentrated in any one area here and there are a number of houses that have been given a birthday, but brand new housing is generally not as much around.
Generally, if you’re going to do a redevelopment and build housing, you’ll do a concentration of townhouses or units because your return on investment is going to be stronger doing that, to build, to buy a house, or a lot of land with a house, knock it down and then build another house, isn’t really going to give you the yield you’d expect, you’re gonna lose money.
Strict body corporates
We do see your cowboys and girls (who are renovating), that come in and do works and the thing is about buildings, you take out a wall and you remove or change and move things, it all seems very sweet and cool but unless you’ve propped it and you’ve made the correct supports it’s, things fall down and things crack and there are issues, so they are stricter on strata here than they have ever been before, because people do do things that affect the integrity of the building.
Apartment living as a lifestyle
Every age group seems to like apartment living now, from the young people who drove that whole apartment living concept, now lots of people are downsizing.
They want to be in apartments and to be able to lock up and walk away - it just has a great appeal versus a house, it used to be that the aim was a couple of kids and a dog and a house and a backyard, but it just represents work these days and people just want as little work as possible, so therefore an apartment has got an appeal, because they can always walk out of that and go to a park or go to the shops or go to a cafe, so the lifestyle round it is what drives it.
Lots of old money
We have quite a diverse mix here, you don’t get a focus or concentration of really anyone, but a lot of the people do have the disposable income, because there’s a lot of old money that's filtering down from grandparents and great grandparents and parents themselves, that's filtering to the children and the grandchildren.
Then they’re going out and buying here.
The traffic needs to be addressed
Traffic is the one issue that the Government needs to address.
What I would do is have an expanded service of ferries running from Watsons Bay, Double Bay and Rose Bay and with that then you have the connection from Circular Quay to throughout the city, so they can get from that point to all aspects and all points of the city.
The second thing I would do is change the hours that the kids are going to school, so instead of it being, call it an 8:30 start you make it a 9:30 start and a later finish, so that there’s designated times that business people will be on the road and there’s designated times that the kids are on the road, and the third thing that I will share would be that it is mandatory that any children within a five kilometre radius of the school must take public transport and the buses are supported and paid for by the Government.
The restaurant and cafe scene is improving
Rose Bay is getting there I think, it's morphed dramatically in the last few years, has it got a way to go, yes, there’s still needs to be more done, but we’ve got three of four really good restaurants here in the area, Catalina’s an old favourite, that’s been here for a million years.
I think you’ll find with the Moran development up in the top part of Vaucluse near Christison Park that that whole cafe society will move even further east, which in itself is a very unique thing, it’s never happened before, it was always a dead pocket there, so that has made a difference.
Local schools are big draw cards
Rose Bay Public is a very big draw card to the area, and they’ll also go up to Woollahra, because Woollahra is a very specialised school and it’s got a great reputation, so both of them are very strong draw cards for the area.
The McAuley of course is another one, so Rose Bay’s certainly got a great draw card for primary schools, and looking at Cranbrook, Kingcoppal, Kambala, and Scotts are again, huge draw cards.