Rank, horrible, the worst: Dumps that buyers couldn't get enough of in 2024
If you follow real estate, you’ll know that beauty doesn’t equate to riches.
Eyesores were some of the most eye-popping sales of the year.
The agents were good sports. Words used by them, with delightful frankness, to describe the listings included rank, smelly and worst they’d ever seen.
Of course, it doesn’t matter, when land value is climbing and postcodes are on up.
Buyers with a renovation budget and a tool belt at the hip were cheerfully up to the task.
These are the seven ugly ducklings that made headlines in 2024.
Brave buyers needed only apply at this “rank” Queensland house of horrors with a “smell”, “hanging on for its life”.
It has three “not so nice bedrooms”, a “poor excuse” for a bathroom and neighbours who are keen to see a change, the delightfully straightforward listing explained.
The property transacted in February.
All seems well from the outside. However, the campaign video opens with Ash Swarts of O’Neil Real Estate approaching the three-bedroom property masked up. It sets the tone for a tour which is anything but average.
The home sold in July for $550,000 and it came with an “array” of belongings left by the former occupants, the playfully tongue-in-cheek listing explains.
These included a bubble-wrapped ceiling, to go with its checkered past.
A dirt bike is parked in the kitchen, with a dog bowl on the floor and debris on the benches. Grass flourishes in the pool. A ceiling is propped up a timber post and there is a yawning hole in the wall in the bathroom.
However, it has plenty of promise, in a beautiful bayside postcode.
It sold for $850,000 in August.
“Does it get any crazier? Why is this even on the market?”
The agent for this tired address in Kelmscott did not gloss over the situation, handling the “worst presented” listing of the year (which went for $589,000) with humour and aplomb.
“Guys, this one – this one is pretty horrible. It is probably the worst-presented home I have presented to the market in the last 12 months,” Ash Swarts, of O’Neill Real Estate, said.
Sydney’s famously forsaken mansion changed hands after a high-profile campaign.
Following half-a-century of neglect, the abandoned estate in elite Mosman has a new owner, and plans are afoot for a swish new trophy home that respects the old site.
The once-handsome property is named Morella. On the harbour and empty for about 50 years, save for squatters and vandals, it has local cult status for its doomsday-like presentation.
The sale price is undisclosed but the campaign hopes hovered $10 million.
Got a wrecking ball? Then you might have been perfect for this burnt-out property out in the outskirts of Sydney.
The listing encouraged potential buyers to “bring their bulldozer” as the property required “many tonnes of work”.
The listing also stated that the address on a deep block, which sold for more than $1.6 million, was once a dumping ground for cars.
The little blue shack did not offer much to look at but gaze beyond the fenceline and the vista is a showstopper.
Offered to the market for the first time in more than 40 years, agents described it as “the worst house in the best street”.
In a plum spot in the Port Stephens area, the water views from the backyard a 575 square-metre, elevated site offered possibilities for sea changers and boaties with an imagination and a grasp on where the true vale lay.
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