Andrew Winter will be speaking at Prop20 in March and April. To register for this event visit proprea.com.au.
Andrew, what is your main area of interest in real estate?
Anything to do with residential real estate! Throughout my career and through media, I’ve dealt with just about everything, from new build projects to renovations to extensions, to developments and from top end to bottom end. There’s not really any part of the real estate market I haven’t seen or witnessed in some way.
What topic(s) will you be speaking on at Prop20?
While rattling on about the past may seem a bit dull for those in their 20s and 30s, the patterns of the market and of supply and demand are a constant.
I expect I’ll be speaking as someone who has seen how recoveries happen, who has seen how booms happen, what makes people tick, what makes people buy and what makes people sell, as well as what makes areas grow and others decrease.
I’m also happy to share some of the hilarious stories we’ve had filming shows about real estate because what people often don’t realise is the reality of it is in both shows that I do we are dealing with real estate agents all the time, many of them, and the variation between the capable, the incapable, the completely useless and the completely fabulous is there.
The real estate profession is like any other in that there’s lots of them out there who are atrocious and lots of them who are very good. So I hope I’ll be able to have a little bit of a free-for-all about reality.
What’s the major difference you’ve noticed in the property market between now and when you started in the industry?
The only fundamental difference between now and when I started in the ’80s is the type of percentage capital growth that Australian real estate has seen in previous decades will probably not be matched by the next few decades.
When a home back in the ’90s and early 2000s went up 10 per cent, it might not have been more than someone’s annual salary.
If it goes up 10 per cent now though, it might actually be more than someone’s annual salary.
It’s not sustainable growth at that rate, but the interesting thing about real estate is if you take the percentage out and look at the real sum of money, such as asking ‘by how many Holden Commodores’ has your house increased by in the past decade, you can link it back to reality.
Although house prices have gone up beyond belief, lots of other things haven’t; our household appliances, our cars and our day-to-day living haven’t increased by as much. Some things are proportionately lower, such as interest rates.
When I was operating in the ’80s and ’90s we were contending with interest rates of 15 and 16 per cent. We’re now talking three per cent. Everyone was on variable rates, there was no such thing as fixed interest rates, and every month you would dread getting mail from your lender saying interest rates have gone up and your repayments have gone up.
