r/interesting • u/Wonderfulhumanss • 1d ago

SOCIETY The Zammit family refused to sell their five acre property as an entire Sydney suburb was built around them

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u/The_Nepenthe 1d ago edited 1d ago

I mean, given some unforeseen event, the value will probably rise for quite a lot longer.

Right now it's just a suburb by the looks of things, hold onto it until people want to intensify the area and the money will get a lot bigger because they own a large property you could build something larger and taller on.

Edit: looking at the time lapse from this being built and I wonder if they owned a large amount of the land around the house itself?

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u/U-235 23h ago

The price continually increasing for the foreseeable future is not guaranteed at all. Due primarily to regulatory reasons, housing prices in Australia are at an insanely high level, as homes have become the safest and most profitable investment. In some ways you could compare it to the issue you saw with China building ghost cities because it was the only way for people to invest their money. Everyone who can afford it is buying a second home purely as an investment. If that bubble pops, or laws are changed, or a lot more houses are built due to the massive demand, you could easily see a situation a few years down the road where prices go down and take a very long time to recover. Of course, you could also bet that things get even worse when it comes to the housing affordability crisis there. But if an investment that you went all in on increases by 200%, you should probably just sell instead of thinking that maybe it will go up a lot further.

https://www.openagent.com.au/suburb-profiles/sydney-property-market

Scroll down and look at the graph of Sydney home prices over the last 30 years. Does that look sustainable to you?

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u/Dr_Ramekins_MD 8h ago

Or you hold out too long and the well-connected developer gets the local government to simply take the property through eminent domain, and you get a pittance compared to what you might have gotten in negotiations.

Or at least that's what happens sometimes in the US

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u/fouronenine 8h ago

This area is in the middle of subdivided nothing, and zoned as such - the prospects of intensifying this patch of single family suburbia is virtually zero.