I am not going to dress this up. The market is genuinely difficult right now and the news cycle is relentless enough that there is no point pretending otherwise. Interest rates remain elevated with further increases still being discussed. Fuel and cost of living pressures are real. The conflict in Iran continues to unsettle global confidence. Trump’s reshaping of international trade adds another layer of uncertainty that nobody can fully price. Locally, the government’s changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax have rattled investor sentiment even in markets like ours that are largely insulated from the direct impact. Across the high income professional community that makes up much of the buyer and vendor pool on this harbour, there is a particular anxiety about what artificial intelligence means for careers and earning capacity that simply did not exist a few years ago.
All of that is real. All of it is affecting confidence. Confidence is what this market runs on.
But here is what I want to tell you, and I say this not as spin but as a statement of fact. Ray White Lower North Shore remains the strongest selling business on the North Shore. We list more, sell more, and transact more high value properties than any other agency in this area. That is not because the market is easy. It is because when the market is hard, the difference between agents with genuine experience and deep local knowledge and those without it becomes very visible very quickly.
Ray White chairman Brian White has a saying I have always believed in: Ray White sails best in light winds. What he means is that when conditions are favourable, any agent can get a result. It is in the difficult markets that the strength of the brand and the depthof the business behind it actually matter. The markets that require real buyer relationships, genuine negotiation skill, and the kind of knowledge that only comes from years of working the same streets. We have the largest buyer database on the North Shore. We have the national reach of Australia’s number one real estate group behind every campaign. We have agents who have been through difficult markets before and know how to navigate them without panicking.
The vendors who are listing with us right now are not naive about conditions. They understand the market. What they also understand is that sitting on the sidelines waiting for perfect conditions is itself a decision with a cost. The buyers still active in this market are not casual. They have a genuine need or a genuine conviction and they are ready to act. The question is whether there is something worth buying when they are. Right now there is very little stock on the harbourfront. The vendors who list with confidence and the right support behind them are the ones capturing those buyers before the spring competition arrives.
Tough markets separate the experienced from the rest. I have been doing this for nearly twenty years on this harbour and our business has never been stronger. That is the environment I am asking you to trust when you are ready to have the conversation.
■ INSIDE THE DEAL
Property styling has become one of the most significant industries to emerge from Sydney real estate in the past two decades. What began as a service reserved for prestige listings is now considered standard practice at almost every price point. The costs are real. A one bedroom apartment runs around $3,500. Two bedrooms around $4,000. Three bedrooms around $6,000. A larger house anywhere from $10,000 upward. Vendors write these cheques because they believe it works. Broadly, they are right.But the return is not what most people think it is. Styling does not add a fixed dollar amount to your result. What it does is create conditions. Better photography drives more clicks online. More clicks drive more inspections. More inspections create more emotional connection with a property. More emotional connection produces more bidders. More bidders is the only thing that reliably drives a better price. An empty, unfurnished property short circuits that chain at every point. Less visual appeal, less foot traffic, less competition, lower result. I have watched this play out too many times across too many campaigns to argue otherwise.
For a long time the camera was a vendor’s best friend. The cluttered study stayed out of the photo set. The dated bathroom was left off the floor plan tour. The tangled hose down the side path was tidied away before the photographer arrived and back in place the moment he left. Buyers knew this was happening. Vendors knew buyers knew. The game continued because there was no alternative.
That is changing. Domain is rolling out Matterport 3D virtual tour technology that gives buyers a fully immersive walkthrough of a property before they ever visit in person. Every room, every corner, every angle, navigable from a phone or a laptop before a single inspection has been booked. I am using it for the first time on a campaign in the coming weeks and I think it is genuinely exciting. It fundamentally changes what a buyer can see before they feel anything.
A standard photograph is a curated moment. A virtual tour is a complete reality. You cannot leave the laundry out. You cannot crop the view from the bedroom that does not quite match the brochure. You cannot hide what the wide angle lens in the living room was quietly exaggerating. Every compromise in a property is now visible before a buyer has ever set foot inside, before they are emotionally committed enough to overlook the things that matter less to them. My honest view is that this raises the bar for genuine preparation well beyond what styling alone can achieve. A beautifully dressed living room next to a bathroom a buyer has already inspected virtually from their sofa is not going to do the job it once did.
“You invested $10,000 creating a precise emotional environment. There is now a button that removes it in one second.”
Built into the platform is one feature I find genuinely thought provoking. With a single click, a buyer can strip every piece of furniture from the virtual tour and see the property completely empty. The carefully chosen artwork, the perfectly dressed bed, the styled kitchen bench, gone. Whether buyers will routinely use this or glance briefly at the empty space and put the furniture back is something I genuinely do not yet know. The question it raises for a vendor who has just invested significantly in staging is a legitimate one. The stylist’s entire purpose is to help a buyer feel something. One click potentially undoes that.
There is also a consequence for physical open homes worth watching carefully. A buyer who can do a thorough virtual inspection from their lounge room may decide they do not need to attend in person. We may already be seeing this, with strong online engagement but softer foot traffic at inspections. A buyer who has never stood in your home, never felt the light at a particular time of day, never experienced the harbour from your living room window, is a buyer who is far less likely to bid with conviction on auction day. Technology that makes your listing more accessible might paradoxically make your result less competitive.
WATCH THIS SPACE
I will have real data from my first Matterport campaign within weeks. I want to know whether virtual tours increase overall enquiry, change who attends in person, and how often that empty room button is actually being used.
Next month I will report back with an honest account of what the numbers showed. In the meantime my advice has not changed. Present your property as well as you possibly can. Fix what needs fixing before the stylist arrives. The camera used to be forgiving. It no longer is.
■ FROM THE ARCHIVES
The Night Kirribilli Burned. December 13, 1921.· P.F.A. Store on Waterfront Gutted · £850,000 Goes Up in Smoke · Southern Wall Falls Into Harbor · Gallant Hopeless Fight
““One of the biggest and most spectacular fires in Sydney for many years broke out on Kirribilli Point this morning, when the seven-floored brick and stone building of the Pastoral Finance Association, containing 32,000 bales of wool, was destroyed. The damage is estimated at about £850,000…” The Daily Telegraph, December 1921
Just after seven o’clock on the morning of December 13, 1921, flames were seen leaping from the windows of the Pastoral Finance Association woolstore at Kirribilli Point. Within minutes, the seven storey brick and stone building, one of the largest commercial structures on the harbour, was an inferno. By the time it was over, 32,000 bales of wool had been destroyed, the damage was estimated at £850,000, and the skyline of Kirribilli had changed forever.
The scale of the disaster was extraordinary even by the standards of a city that had seen its share of fires. The southern wall collapsed into the harbour. The northern wall fell across Campbell Street, now known as Kirribilli Avenue. The western wall went into Beulah Street. Furniture was carried out of nearby homes and piled on lawns. Houses and trees in Kirribilli Avenue caught fire. Naval men from warships anchored in the harbour came ashore to help fight the blaze, carrying tubes of ammonia from the company’s freezing works along Carabella Street to safety. A demolition party stood by with industrial explosives, ready to bring down sections of the burning building if the fire threatened to spread further.
Admiralty House, on the eastern side of the burning building, came perilously close to being swept into the inferno. It was saved by the combined efforts of naval men and firemen. The Governor General was away from Sydney that morning. Admiralty House was closed.
The firefighting effort was heroic and largely futile. Engines came from Circular Quay, Pyrmont, Darlinghurst, North Sydney, Crow’s Nest, Neutral Bay and Newtown. But the Kirribilli water main was only six inches in diameter and the pressure was hopelessly inadequate. Two fire floats were called urgently to the scene but the intense heat kept them too far from the blaze for their hoses to reach it. The solution, arrived at in desperation, was to convert the fire floats into pumping stations, siphoning harbour water up to the engines on shore where it was pumped through three hoses into one to finally obtain the necessary pressure. If the morning had not been completely calm, there is little doubt that the surrounding homes and Admiralty House itself would have been lost.
Across the harbour, crowds gathered in their thousands at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and Fort Macquarie to watch the building burn. Flames were visible from Circular Quay, shooting through hundreds of windows of the blazing structure. It was, by any measure, one of the great spectacles in the history of Sydney Harbour.
What happened next is perhaps the most interesting part of the story. In the days following the fire, local newspapers published what one journalist later described as gloating comments from North Shore residents about the destruction of the woolstore. The building had been an eyesore, a seven storey industrial hulk sitting on one of the most beautiful points in the harbour, and there were those who made little effort to conceal their satisfaction at its disappearance. Decades later, when a builder named Mr Stewart excavated the site to lay foundations for a new block of flats, his workmen dug up battered wool hooks, scorched docket books and grubby tufts of wool from the earth. The site became the block of flats you can see today on the western foreshore of the point.
The PFA woolstore opened on the site on December 13, 1890. It burned to the ground on December 13, 1921. Exactly thirty one years to the day.
DO YOU KNOW MORE?
Each month I include a piece of local history that most people have never come across. If you have old photographs, family stories or curiosities connected to Kirribilli or McMahons Point, I would genuinely love to hear about them. And if you’d like a copy of this month’s A5 history card posted to you, just reply to this email.
Reach out to David to discuss the harbourside market:
David Gillan, Director
Ray White Lower North Shore Group
0411 255 914
david.gillan@raywhite.com
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