Buyer's Guide to this Dover Heights Neighbourhood
Robert Terley is born and bred Eastern Suburbs and has been servicing the area for six years.
Popular spot for the South African 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.
In particular the Jewish South Africans presence is very, very strong, anytime you jump around here you’d be hard placed not to hear the twang.
They’re great because they’re hugely community minded, they get things done, they’re efficient, and you combine those three things and things morph into great things because they are not prepared let things slide, they want things a certain way and they get it because that's the standard they’ve kept for that they do in here and what they do with their businesses.
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.
Military Road used to known as "poor mans Vaucluse"
Essentially a lot of the old houses, especially on Military Road, all the old P&O style homes, have been bowled down and new ones have been built, same story on on Blake Street in this pocket.
So people are bowling down what was existing and building very large homes, they are just massive, but they are taking advantage of the view.
When I was kid it used to be, and please pardon the expression, known as “poor man’s Vaucluse,” but it certainly has taken over, and it's not to the same degree as expensive as other parts of Vaucluse, we aren't seeing that 18 million dollar transaction but you do get up to 5-7 million dollar properties in the area, which you’d never ever expect in this pocket.
New housing stock is drawing Chinese investors
Recently we've been seeing quite a number of Chinese and offshore buyers that have come into the area and have bought here.
It's been surprising but then again with Chinese buyers the houses usually have to be full brick dwellings with a suspended slab, and there’s enough homes like that around this area to draw them.
Interesting they don’t necessarily come to move in and live, it’s just a place to maybe park money, but they can come here, they may have a house here and they may have a house in London and they may have a house in other cities, sometimes they set up home here but we’ve had a lot that haven’t, and there’s no one living there for months on end.