It's thirty years ago this month when I bought "Riverbend". Thirty years is almost half a lifetime. Unfortunately, it's the second half of my lifetime which means sometime soon I need to think of selling up to live somewhere nearer to more amenities and with less maintenance work as is required here.
At a time when most residential real estate consists of the largest possible house on the smallest possible land, with most people not buying houses but kitchens and bathrooms - one for each bedroom and a spare one, just in case - and the house being just somewhere to keep them, Riverbend's old-fashioned house with just two bathrooms but on more than seven acres seems to be a bit of a misfit - just like its owner.
And just like the misfit that I am, I don't think I would be prepared to pay someone around $75,000 to tell someone else, "Come on, jump in my car and I drive you to a place you might like to buy" (more often they just give that someone the address and say, "I'll meet you there")
As I already wrote elsewhere, when the time comes, I will list the property for sale without an agent because I'm not overwhelmed by the calibre of agents in Batemans Bay - I'm not even whelmed; as a matter of fact, I'm totally underwhelmed which is a term specifically coined (by me) to describe the real estate agents in the Bay.
With the internet having become virtually the only property search method used by potential buyers, I refuse to pay some former-whatever-but-usually-failed and now self-proclaimed "real estate expert" two-and-half-percent commission for an eight-kilometre trip from Batemans Bay to Nelligen. Some real estate websites, like realestate.com.au, don't allow individuals to list properties. To get around this, for-sale-by-owner websites have sprung up which enable individuals to list on all the websites, including realestate.com.au, for just a few hundred dollars:
If there's anyone out there right now who's interested, I'm listening! What's the price, I hear you ask. Simply work back from $75,000 being 2.5%, and you have a good point from which to start the negotiations.
