The deal is done.
The brief
I recently worked with a lovely client based interstate. Her plan was to rent a Brisbane apartment out now and make it home herself in about five years. She had been weighing it up for a while, and at one point I asked her the only question that really mattered. What are you waiting for?
Her purchase had to do two jobs. Perform as an investment from day one, and be a home she would genuinely love down the track. She had not fixed on a suburb, so finding the right one was my job. That search led me to Teneriffe, one of Brisbane's blue-chip riverside pockets, where quality stock rarely reaches the market.
Good properties don't wait
In this market, good properties don't wait for anyone. There was another buyer circling the same apartment. They were taking their time, and right now, twenty-four hours is too long. I wasn't going to let my client miss out on this one.
So I moved. I inspected the apartment at 2:45pm on a Tuesday afternoon. By 9:30pm that night, the contract was signed and the apartment was hers. A good buyers agent works to get the deal done for their client, whatever hour that takes. This time, it took until 9:30pm.
Why this one was worth fighting for
The suburb has delivered, and then some. Unit values in Teneriffe have grown 96 per cent over the past five years, and 21.7 per cent in the last twelve months alone. With a rental appraisal of $850 a week, the apartment earns its keep from the moment she settles.
But the numbers were only the beginning. What makes this property special is everything about it that can never be changed.
What can never be changed
The complex has just 24 apartments on roughly 3,500 square metres, in one of the most tightly held pockets of inner Brisbane. No developer today could make those numbers work. What is standing there now is all there will ever be.
Her apartment is a renovated two bed, two bath, 125 square metres internal, on the top level of a two-storey 1997 brick building. And her outlook runs straight over the road to a row of pre-war homes that sit under Brisbane's Traditional building character overlay. They carry demolition protection, so nobody can knock them over, and nobody can build something taller in front of her.
Anyone can stand at an open home and admire an outlook. Very few people pull up the overlay mapping to check whether it will still be there in ten years. I did. That is the difference between buying a feature and buying a position.
Low density that can't be repeated. A view that can't be built out. A street that can't be ruined. Space that can't be rebuilt. New apartments simply aren't built at 125 square metres anymore. Not in a suburb like this, not without a multi-million dollar price tag attached.
And even with another buyer at the table, I secured it for her $42,000 under budget.
The lesson I want to leave you with
The question I get asked more than almost any other is, what is the cheapest suburb I can buy into? And it gets wealth creation in property backwards. The market doesn't reward you for buying something cheap. It rewards you for owning something that more and more people want over time.
So the better question is this.
The purchase at a glance
