I Remember When With Milton Rendell

Do you remember when you wanted find out about real estate, you use to pick the Realtor Magazine? The ads were all in black and white. You would pick it up from your local real estate office or make an appointment to go and talk to your local agent. When I started in real estate in 1987, the Realtor magazine was renamed the Homebuyer magazine, which eventually had colour ads.

I also remember we use to take photos of houses, then take the film down to the chemist to get developed, then we would glue those pictures on a card and place them in the window. Those were the days. One of my first home opens was in North Street in Midland. It was a very neat fibro home on the old fashioned quarter acre block. It had nice polished floor boards, a couple of bedrooms, plus a sleep out, like the houses most of us grew up in.

That block was zoned for development and today would have four or more villas on it. The asking price was around the forty thousand dollars and people were saying “too expensive are they dreaming?”. Yes reflecting on that today what a bargain! I remember writing an offer in the A new sub-division in Bellevue called Clayton Estate. It was about a seven hundred square meter block, and the offer was six thousand five hundred dollars. Anyway the buyer pulled out, before I had a chance to present the offer to the sellers.

They thought they may have been paying too much. Also I once wrote an offer on a block in Boya. It was half an acre with city views for twenty nine thousand five hundred dollars and was a record price at the time. It was a long time ago and I laugh at all the conversations at the time about how expensive real estate was then. Values have changed just a bit since then, but every weekend since 1987 I’ve heard the same thing about real estate. I guess somethings never change.