If you’re a Sydney real estate agent you might want to stop reading here.
Even though I’d really like you to finish it.
Oh yeah, if you think you recognise yourself here ... well, you probably do.
Let’s begin by saying there is a special place in real estate heaven (which, for most of the rest of us, is actually hell) for the people who write (in a manner) advertising material – “media”, as they call it in the game – to sell residential property. Even by the hyperbolic standards of the worst advertising industry quackery, real estate media in Sydney inhabits a parallel universe fit to challenge Ray Bradbury.
You know, the agents who’ll describe a sooty terrace with a price tag of $2.4m and wedged between a paint stripper factory and a chicken processing plant as “enviably situated in a tightly held enclave”?
To them, every house is a “haven”, a crack den under the flight path “a tranquil family oasis” and a vermin-infested weatherboard on for a “modest” $1.82m and next to the bus depot, an “uncut gem”.
Every address is, naturally, “premier”, not to mention “rare” (oh yes – like the one with the “second bathroom” that was, in fact, an exposed tub on a rickety verandah) and “possessed of irresistible potential”.
Gardens are invariably “lush” and “al fresco ready” (al fresco, by the way, is often a noun – as in “and there’s your al fresco” or “irresistible al fresco for perfect family togetherness”).
Once, of course, it was that old euphemism, the “renovator’s delight”. Nowadays it is possessed of “irresistible potential … lying in wait for your next chapter”.
Chapter 2: It was a dark and stormy night. He doused the joint in petrol before digging in his pocket for a lighter and …
I did inspect one that was described by Brad or Clint or Wes or some other agent channelling the inner bard as “a blank canvas upon which to paint your future fantasies and dreams”. It turned out to be a reductive take on a complete house; I fantasised about sealing him in the “inexpensive future, potential loft conversion”, and dreamt of how it might look if it actually had complete walls and doors.
Real estate photographers, meanwhile, are masters of a particularly dark art in the property game. Rarely does anything look nearly as good (or as big) in the bricks and mortar and weatherboard as it does in the brochures or online – which is why, of course, vendors will invest tens of thousands of dollars in the media.
And can anyone explain to me what it is about San Pellegrino and artichokes that renders them requisite for the brochures and online pictures – even if the house might be falling down around them? Perhaps it’s a talisman, a warning, that once you’ve bought and paid the stamp duty (thanks for nothing) and factored in the cost of a small renovation so your kids have an actual bedroom (the one online turned out to be what they call a “nook” – meaning a kind of doorless, windowless cupboard) you’ll never afford to eat anything but raw vegetables again.
Of course, you know what you’re buying when the media features just the back shed and says “roll up your sleeves for this one” and when, from every angle, the apartment looks like a scene from CSI complete with suspiciously person-shaped brown stain in the middle of the living room.
When you’re waiting with dozens of others for an open house to open, there’s an unspoken yet highly competitive game where the winner is first to declare, “There’s the agent!” – while pointing to the latest model Merc, BMW or Rover that’s turned into the street.
Ah, but they earn it with all those phone calls.
“I have a unique offering for you maaaate,” one of them promised me during one of his many calls.
So I went and looked. I told him in a follow-up call I wasn’t interested because there was no green space for my dogs. He rang back two weeks later to say the property was actually over-priced (smelling salts please!) and would I think again now that $10,000 had been cut from the price.
“Would you consider getting a sledgehammer and smashing up some concrete and planting grass?” he asked.
I replied: “Only if you come and help me.”
“No … we don’t do that.”
Or irony.
Then there was the house with the staircase that belonged in Andy Griffiths 78-storey tree house (now that’s a house).
No, I explained – my elderly father-in-law would never be able to get to the upstairs bedroom when he comes to stay.
“How about you get him to sleep on the downstairs sofa?” the agent suggested.
“How about I just send him ‘round to crash at your joint,” I countered.
Not so much as a smile from her.
Yes, encountering Sydney’s residential real estate hell is undeniably a first world problem.
If you stop a while and really think about it, there’s an obvious dilemma – and for many, no doubt, a rather delicious irony – associated with that. Well, there is for me anyway. And that is that property in Australia is none too elaborate theft because it stands on Indigenous land.
And now the original theft of the land around Sydney stands beneath new layers of thievery and connivance.
