Buyer's Guide to this Vaucluse Neighbourhood
Robert Terley is born and bred Eastern Suburbs and has been servicing the area for six years.
Popular spot for the Jewish community
There’s still a very strong ethnicity here, there’s a lot of Jewish people that live within this area, because you are still within walking distance to the Synagogue, so it’s a popular one for Jewish people to buy and live, whether it be houses, semis or units, they are all the flavour.
Lots of older apartments
You’re looking at predominantly apartments here and there’s a lot of the old deco’s, especially on the harbour side.
Essentially a lot of them are smaller apartments, they’re not big grand homes that people have lived in for generations.
Old South Head Road was a starting point
Some twenty years ago this was a place where it was a starting point for those that wanted live in this suburb, it was a very affordable locality being on a main road in general but especially Old South Head Road, was very affordable.
Old South Head Road has changed and morphed to a degree now, but in those days that's what it was and it’s not generational of people that have been here, most people these days stay three to five years in a place, apartments have a lot shorter tenure.
Very attractive lifestyle
This part of the world has got virtually anything and everything, as far as lifestyle goes, you’re within walking distance to get to water, whether you go to the cliff side and you walk up towards the cliffs or whether you go down towards the harbour, it’s all within, call it a twenty minute walk of where you are in that spot, so you get to water which, especially the harbour, it’s the focus of what Sydney’s all about.
You’ve also got golf courses, you’ve got the Royal, you’ve got the Woollahra Golf Club, you’ve got Rose Bay tennis clubs, you’ve got literally anything and everything you want, now you’ve got Coles and Woolworths, so you’ve got shopping and there’s some cute boutiques in Rose Bay as well that you can shop at, and instead of it being daggy and old - it’s hip and cool.
Investment has cooled
It’s still an area that people will look to buy an investment, it seems to be generally cooling however and we could theorise about big brother as to why it’s been cooled, but the banks are making it a lot harder on the investment side, so hence there’s not as much in the way of investments but they are still investing.
Less appealing to buy fixer-uppers
Because the building industry has gone through a morph, today builders are asking seven and a half thousand, per square meter, a massive increase on where it used to be, and consequently people have been doing a lot renovation but we’re finding that there’s big morph now for people saying we want everything renovated and built and done before we buy, because they know that the costs and complexities involved and that's putting a lot of people off.
That having been said others are sitting on homes, and saying well we don’t want to live the way we are living, it’s too expensive to move, the next step up is to bridge the gap, so therefore we’ll renovate or we’ll build, so there is a lot of renovating going on for pre-existing owners but people that are buying are generally trying to buy something that's done.