Buying property: then and now

Then, buying property was too easy: houses cost nothing so everyone would go out on a Saturday morning and buy one or two before lunch.  Even us kids would pop down to the milkbar with our pocket money and come home with a few musk sticks, a dozen pineapple lumps, a Cola Glug, and a three-bedroom brick Californian Bungalow. But now, houses are crazy-expensive, no one can afford them: you need to borrow massive amounts of money from a special money-lending institution called “Your Parents”, which is like a bank except the queues are shorter and you have to make sure you wipe your feet before you come in.

Then, real estate agents were shonky little characters: tough pushy blokes in cheap suits, only a couple of notches above horse-racing bookies or Squizzy Taylor.  They were all pumped on caffeine and Winnie Reds, yabbering in your face like Scorsese in a DVD audio commentary.  But now, real estate agents are all Zen and polite, male and female, charming and well-appointed, boasting a north-facing exterior, quaint period detail, and a superbly-maintained blend of formal and causal living where “life meets style”.

Then, looking for property was dead boring: you scoured through pages and pages of classifieds, all text-only listings, no house-photos unless it was a prestige property like Kirribilli House or Great Keppel Island. But now, looking for property is a visual delight: you go online and take a 3D Virtual-Reality Walk-Through Movie-Tour, directed by an Oscar-nominated cinematographer, with crane-shots and steadicam-footage and drone-cameras flying through upstairs windows, paying respectful homage to Orson Welles’ iconic through-the-skylight sequence in Citizen Kane.

Then, open-for-inspections were kind of creepy: you walked into a dirty old house furnished with milkcrate-furniture and carpets made of housemate pube-trimmings. And sometimes the occupants were still in the house so you had to tiptoe through a bedroom with a pair of feet poking out the bottom of the bed, another pair of feet lying on top.  But now open-for-inspections are glamorous red-carpet events: the houses have been completely re-furnished by Philippe Starck and the exhibition-design-team from MONA.  The air is scented with freshly-baked cookies, vanilla pods, and concentrated extract of newborn baby-head.  And you’re allowed to wander around on your own, do what you like: take a nap in a bedroom, have a shower in the bathroom, scroll through your Instas on the computer.  The real estate agent won’t mind, as long as you keep your clothes on and don’t mess with the wi-fi settings.

Then, everyone just wanted a house with the basics: kitchen, bedrooms, a door to get in and out –  but if a door’s not possible, you’re happy to just crawl in and out through the bathroom window, if there’s a bathroom.  But now, people want so much more:  they want media rooms, home offices, butler’s pantries, artist studios, and a torture dungeon/basement with abattoir hooks and a strap-down dentist chair.  Nothing fancy, just a small one, like the neighbour’s have got.

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a new TV series on ABC3.