Albert Park, Rosebud auctions leave first-home buyers ‘shattered’
12 Little Page Street, Albert Park, attracted five bidders, among them first-home buyers.
“Shattered” first-home buyers are being edged out of auctions as investors and downsizers dig deep to purchase into Melbourne’s booming market.
Six first timers were among nine bidders who fought for a “basic” brick-veneer home in Rosebud — but they couldn’t keep up with a Balwyn-based investor who pushed the price up to $816,000.
This was $216,000 above the reserve, Belle Rosebud and Dromana director Grant McConnell said.
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18 Hayes Avenue, Rosebud, attracted a whopping nine bidders.
Inside the humble Rosebud home.
“You just shake your head (over sales like this), and walk away saying, ‘it doesn’t make sense’. It’s staggering,” he said.
“The buyer was an investor from Melbourne, but we had six young couples bidding who were looking to get into the market. They’re shattered.”
Mr McConnell said the Mornington Peninsula’s red-hot rental market — which was seeing “20 applications on every property within 24 hours” of them being listed — was luring investors.
“Plus with interest rates so low, your money is doing nothing in the bank,” he said.
The modest ’90s-built house at 18 Hayes Street occupied a 772sq m block walking distance from Rosebud’s beach, shops and eateries.
In Albert Park, first-home buyers missed out on another humble brick house as a downsizer paid $140,000 above reserve to snare it.
Five bidders pushed the 12 Little Page Street property to a $1.115m sale price that was almost 33 times the $34,000 figure it last sold for in the ’80s, according to CoreLogic records.
12 Little Page Street, Albert Park, sold for $1.115m.
The Albert Park home’s sale was “emotional” for the family who had owned it for four decades.
Cayzer Albert Park director Simon Carruthers said the two-bedroom home was “the most affordable house that has come on the market in Albert Park for a while”, with its $900,000-$990,000 quoted range generating 90 buyer inspections during the selling campaign.
Mr Carruthers expected the purchaser to update parts of the house, including the kitchen, without doing a full-blown renovation.
Vendors Amanda Lo Cascio and her brother sold their childhood home after their mum, its long-term owner, died last year.
Ms Lo Cascio said parting with the house — which she had been “back and forth from … for the last 44 years” — had been “emotional”.
She moved into the house at five years old with parents Patricia and Pino, and her brother.
Some childhood mischief from the vendors led to the home’s exposed brick walls.
The house is small in stature but big on character.
Ms Lo Cascio said her parents met in Italy and later moved to South Melbourne before settling into the Albert Park abode, first as renters before they bought it off their landlord a few years later.
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“It’s a small house — only 90sq m. But it’s been filled with so much family, and friends,” she said.
“It was the centre of our family, even though it was probably the smallest house in the family.”
Ms Lo Cascio fondly recalled playing on the street, buying Slurpees at the local 7-Eleven, walking to the beach and jumping off the pier as a kid.
Her and her brother also got up to a bit of mischief at the house, including a time “my mother came home from work and we had taken all the plaster off the walls in the front room”. The family decided to do the same to the rest of the house, and it retains exposed-brick walls to this day.
Albert Park has changed “a lot” since the family first moved in.
She said Albert Park had “changed a lot” since they moved in, from a “working-class suburb” to a wealthy one.
Barry Plant Mill Park director Jay Moxon said investors had been rushing back into his market since the Victorian Government introduced a 25 per cent stamp duty discount for anyone who purchased an existing home for less than $1m. The state budget measure applies until July 1.
“That created a big buzz. We started seeing investors coming back (after being quiet during lockdown),” he said.
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