Please DM me as the help I need is private thank you so much!

The tiling and membrane of my apartment balcony is cracked and needs to be fully replaced. We have been quoted $32k which seems pretty high. Any input on whether this is reasonable would be very much appreciated. I have attached pictures of the balcony and details of the quote. Thanks very much!

Should I agree to this settlement?

I signed a one year lease (March 2026- March 2027)

However had to break the lease from October 2026 but we let them know since start of August, we’ve followed through with finding our own applicants for a lease transfer so that costs don’t add up too much however it seemed like they weren’t even checking in on applications we sent over so we gave into the second option— which was to pay them to handle everything. Now:

- we’ve vacated the place and handed in the keys almost 2 weeks ago
- We paid $275 in advertising costs— we haven’t seen any advertisements so far regarding the property when we searched them up.
- our letting fee was $457.34

Now our lease agreement states that we’ll be responsible for rent up until new tenants are found however my agent just proposed for me to pay a one-off of 1 month rent worth because
1. Rental loss during vacancy period
2. Ongoing rental shortfall because market price is below by $20 a week which would make up a potential shortfall of $1040 for 52 weeks.

Should i agree to this settlement ?

Hey.

Was looking at buying a place on the Mornington Peninsula with some space and some of the options are on rain/tank water. Having been from the melbourne suburbs my entire life i havent lived with tank water before.

Tempted to just dismiss them as am option but figured i should ask for others opinions/experiences.

If a place already has filtration and UV setup what are people thoughts? Worth considering or more a PITA than its worth?

Thanks.

Hi Everyone, considering to buy an apartment in sydney and would like some guidance 🙏🏻

I recently had a building and pest inspection done, and the report flagged moisture in the external cladding or wall adjoining the winter garden, living room, and bedroom. They have termed it as a major defect.

Would like to understand from other apartment owners in high-rise buildings how major this is, Please help🙏🏻

Nasdaq pushed +1.11% and SOXL popped +5.32% today. Great news, right? Until you realize currency fluctuations and broker FX spreads eat away a solid 1-2% when you cash back out to your Commonwealth/ANZ account. Plus, if you haven't held for 12 months, ATO wants their full cut without the 50% CGT discount 💀

How are you legends managing your US profit taking right now? Keeping it in USD inside IBKR/Stake, or bringing it home?

Let's say you make an offer subject to sale of your own house with a 60 day clause.

1. At what stage do you apply for a home loan? Only once you've received an unconditional offer on your own home?

2. How can you confidently calculate what value of loan to apply for? Since the exact deposit you'll be left with after selling is variable.

3. Can you wisely set a finance clause that expires 2 weeks after your sale clause? Is this a red flag to the seller that is better avoided?

Hi, we’re considering upsizing to 49 Mary Street, Kew and would really appreciate some opinions, particularly from locals.

The location would make getting the kids to school a lot easier, which is probably the biggest draw for us. The main thing we’re unsure about is how close it is to the cemetery. It doesn’t particularly bother us, but would it make the house harder to sell down the track? Would it put you off buying?

Would also love to hear from anyone who lives around there. Is it quiet and safe in this area..?

And what do people think of the asking price? Does it seem fair for the house and location, or is there something we’re missing?

We’d be selling our current place to buy this one, so we’d need to get the sale and finance moving pretty quickly if we go ahead. We can’t really afford to hold both, and we’d probably end up with a bigger mortgage, which is a bit daunting.

We like the house, but it’s a big move and we’re trying not to get carried away just because it would make the school run easier. Keen to hear some honest opinions, especially from locals. Thanks!

Quick disclosure first: this comes from PropertyFlags, which reads government registers and turns them into property reports, so we have an interest in the topic. The numbers below are from the government's own modelling and every one of them can be checked.

Here's what got us started. The airport opens to passengers this Sunday and has no curfew; from 1 November it is intended to open for night flights and become Sydney's airport for overnight freight. The flight paths were signed off in June 2025 and have been live in the airspace since July, and the government publishes noise contours for them for 2033, 2040 and 2055. They're public, they're just buried in a tool most people have never opened. So we checked every street address in NSW against them.

The contour that matters most for sleep is the night one: a spot that hears at least two aircraft louder than 60 dB between 11 pm and 5.30 am on an average night.

In 2033, with no runway preference, that covers 17,963 addresses. There is a quieter night mode where planes land from the southwest and take off towards the southwest, away from most of the houses, and the government has told Airservices to prefer it at night "where possible". In the two scenarios where that mode is preferred, the count drops to about 5,100 to 5,200. The modelling already allows for nights when the weather rules the quiet mode out, but nobody knows yet how often it will really be used, so the real 2033 number sits somewhere between about 5,100 and 17,963. 2033 is when the modelling has the airport at its first stage of 10 million passengers a year; the first years after opening will have fewer flights than that.

By 2040 the upper figure is 30,716. By 2055 it is 44,925. The footprint grows with traffic.

With no runway preference, St Marys has the most addresses inside: 6,184 of its 10,402, all at two to four events a night. Werrington (1,613), St Clair (1,385), Hassall Grove (1,110), Luddenham (1,044) and Mulgoa (955) follow. In the scenarios where the quiet mode is preferred, St Marys, Werrington, St Clair and Mulgoa drop out of the 2033 night contour altogether and Hassall Grove and Luddenham keep hundreds of addresses, while eight suburbs south of the airport come in, with 1,096 addresses between them, led by Brownlow Hill, Mount Hunter and Cobbitty. The zone with ten or more events a night is small: 745 addresses with no runway preference, mostly in Luddenham (299) and Badgerys Creek (238), close to the runway.

The part we didn't expect councils already use a different contour for new development, from the planning rules for the Western Parkland City. It's a different kind of measure, a planning contour drawn for the airport's long term rather than a count of planes, and it covers 3,667 addresses across Silverdale, Luddenham, Horsley Park, Badgerys Creek, Kemps Creek, Mount Vernon and a few more, far more than the 236 inside the airport's own 2033 ANEC contour. You can be outside every 2033 night contour and inside the planning one at the same time: 1,704 of those 3,667 addresses are, including 340 of the 341 in Mount Vernon. Both are correct. One says what an average night in 2033 should sound like, the other says what a council will assume when it assesses the next house on your street.

If you're looking at buying out there, the thing we'd actually do is this: type the address into the government's tool (wsiflightpaths.gov.au), read the night figures rather than the daytime ones and look at more than one runway scenario, and once night flights start in November, go and stand in the street after 11 pm on a couple of different nights. The quiet mode depends on wind and rain that night, so a single quiet evening proves nothing.

Sources: the WSI Aircraft Overflight Noise Tool and the airspace EIS (Department of Infrastructure), the WSI flight path brochure, the department's flight paths page, the Prime Minister's opening announcement, the NSW Planning Portal airport noise layer, Geoscape G-NAF. To make sure the counting was right we re-checked 120 addresses against the NSW planning server and 600 with a second method, and a separate full recount of all 5.2 million NSW addresses matched every figure. The suburb table and the full write up are in a comment below so this post doesn't read as an ad. Happy to answer questions about the method or about a specific suburb.

Edit: clarified that the St Marys, Werrington, St Clair and Mulgoa figures are for the scenario with no runway preference and added the 1 November date for night flights.

Seeing this come up a lot lately, and genuinely curious what people chose and how it worked out.

The dilemma is real: your HECS balance chips away at your borrowing capacity with most lenders (they factor in the repayments even if you’re not thinking about them), but wiping it out means your deposit grows more slowly. And with indexation doing what it did the last couple of years, it’s not a straightforward answer.

A few things I’d love to hear your thoughts on:

• Did you pay down HECS first, save for the deposit first, or try to do both at once, and would you do it differently now?
• Did your HECS debt actually affect how much a bank would lend you, or did it not make much real-world difference?
• For those who got into the market while still owing HECS, did you end up paying LMI (lenders mortgage insurance) because your deposit was smaller as a result?
• Anyone here who was told by a broker or banker that clearing HECS would meaningfully increase their borrowing capacity?
• And for the high earners, does it even matter once you’re above a certain income threshold?

No right answer here; I just want to hear actual experiences rather than the standard “it depends” advice you get everywhere.

l plan to sell my house and find another house to buy in another area. l dont want to have to rent after l sell my house and looking for another one, so l was thinking if l had a 6 month settlement period l could live in my house while looking for another one to buy, would it be hard to find a buyer who would accept a 6 month settlement, or what if l offered to pay rent for the 6 months

How much do you currently pay your rent in Sydney?

Just a question. I have seen thousands of homes now built if not to the boundary, incredibly close to it. A hot water tank between wall and fence, or a shared wall.

I own a detached house and I’m always having to potter about doing maintenance. There’s always something to do.

I’m wondering if these homes that are built to the boundary have additional risks because of access issues - and if something did need remedial work, how is it done? Who pays? How are external eaves (if there even are eaves- I’ve been watching them shrink over the years) or walls accessed? Or are they so well built that they just don’t have issues?

Ok, so Ive been seeing plenty of properties sitting on the market for months because sellers refuse to budge on their ridiculous price expectations.

Would love to hear some stories of sellers getting a reality check. Maybe they rejected a perfectly reasonable offer, only to sell for significantly less months later, or ended up pulling the listing altogether.

Bonus points if you’ve got actual numbers. Could use some as entertainment /s