Property Finders Group

30/08/2026

29/08/2026

Would I buy an apartment as an investment?

Yes.

But I’d be very selective.

There’s a common assumption that if you’re investing in property, a house is automatically the better choice.

And generally, houses have performed better than apartments over the past decade.

But here’s where I think it gets interesting.

It’s not just about how much land you get. It’s about the value of that land.

An apartment in a small established complex in a great location can be a very different investment from one of hundreds of identical apartments in a high rise.

The boutique apartment may have genuine scarcity.

It may appeal to owner occupiers as well as tenants.

It may be in a location where land is difficult to create more of.

And it can give you access to a suburb where buying a house would cost considerably more.

That matters.

Apartments can also have lower purchase prices and, in many cases, stronger rental yields than houses, making them cheaper to hold.

But I’m not talking about buying any apartment simply because the numbers look attractive.

I’d be looking at:

Location

Scarcity

The size and type of the complex

Owner occupier appeal

Potential to add value

The land component

The total cost of owning it

And this is probably the biggest takeaway for me:

Don’t confuse “investment property” with “investment grade property”.

There is plenty of property marketed to investors that I wouldn’t consider investment grade.

For me, the best properties are the ones that have broad appeal. Properties that people would genuinely want to own and live in.

Sometimes that will be a house.

Sometimes it might be a townhouse or villa.

And sometimes it will be an established apartment in exactly the right location.

So if you’re weighing up a house versus an apartment, don’t just ask:

“Which one gives me more land?”

Ask:

“Which property gives me the best combination of location, scarcity, demand and value?”

That’s a much more interesting question.

28/08/2026

Friday views

One of those little scenes you can easily take for granted when you live here.

Driving between Aldinga and Willunga, the canola is putting on a pretty spectacular show at the moment.

Golden fields, big skies, vines, rolling hills and the coast not too far away.

This is the Fleurieu Peninsula yet another best. It’s one of the reasons I love helping people find their place here.

Sometimes it’s not just about the house. It’s about the everyday views, the lifestyle and how you want to feel when you’re home.

Happy Friday

28/08/2026

Golden fields, big skies, vines, rolling hills and the coast not too far away

24/08/2026

Not all properties are competing in the same market.

That's becoming clearer by the week here in Adelaide. The headline numbers still look strong: dwelling values up 10.5% over the past year, 68.5% over five, and buyer demand holding steady across the affordable and middle segments. But underneath that, the experience of an individual seller is splitting in two.

Auction clearance sitting around 48% tells the real story. That's roughly even ground between buyers and sellers, not a market where anything with a price tag will move. Buyers are taking their time, weighing options, and being far more selective about where they put an offer in.

Which means presentation and pricing now do more work than they did twelve months ago. A well-located, well-presented property priced in line with genuine market expectations can attract strong interest almost immediately. Ask too much or present poorly, and it can sit for weeks while more realistic listings around it get snapped up.

For buyers, that gap is worth paying attention to too. The properties attracting quick, competitive interest are rarely the ones sitting on the main listing portals for long. Some of the better-fit opportunities never make it there at all. And when something has sat unsold for a while, it's worth resisting the assumption that something must be wrong with it. More often than not, the property was fine, it was simply priced wrong, and that gap between perception and reality is exactly where knowing your numbers protects you from overpaying or missing out.

Different market for different properties. Worth knowing which one you're in.

24/08/2026

The downsizer is dead. Long live the right-sizer.

For years, "downsizing" has been shorthand for a fairly narrow idea: an older couple sells the family home, buys something smaller, and banks the difference. Less house, less garden, less to manage. Job done.

I don't think that's what's actually happening anymore. Not in Adelaide.

What I'm seeing in conversations with clients, in the properties they ask me to find, in the ones they walk away from, is something closer to what one commentator recently described as "right-sizing": buyers who aren't chasing smaller for its own sake, but chasing better fit. They want less maintenance, certainly. Fewer stairs, less lawn, less weekend spent on upkeep. But they are not willing to trade away the space, the amenity, or the quality of life they've spent decades building.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.

A true downsizer treats space as the enemy. A right-sizer treats space as negotiable. They'll give up a spare bedroom they never use, but not the north-facing living area that gets the winter sun. They'll happily lose the pool nobody's swum in for three years, but they still want a kitchen worth cooking in and a block that doesn't feel like a compromise every time they walk in the door.

I think this shift says something about who's doing the moving. These are buyers in their late fifties through seventies who are, by and large, asset-rich and time-poor in a different way than they used to be. Not poor for hours in the day, but unwilling to spend those hours on maintenance they no longer see the point of. They've done the big renovation. They've done the acreage. What they want now is a home that has already had the thinking done for it: good bones, good orientation, low-fuss materials, and a location that keeps them connected rather than isolated.

That last part is where a lot of "downsizer" stock quietly fails. A compact townhouse an hour from everyone they know is not a right-size. It's a compromise dressed up as a lifestyle choice. The buyers I work with are far more discerning about this than the market gives them credit for. They will pay a premium to stay close to their networks, their coastline, their community, even if it means the floor plan is smaller than the brochure implies.

For the market, this has a practical consequence: the stock that actually suits right-sizers is thinner on the ground than the volume of "downsizer-friendly" listings would suggest. Plenty of smaller homes exist. Fewer of them are genuinely well-built, well-located, and free of the compromises this cohort has stopped being willing to make. That gap is exactly where good buying advocacy earns its keep, not in finding a smaller home, but in finding the right one, often before it's advertised as a downsizer property at all.

If there's one thing I'd want this cohort to hear, it's this: don't let the label define the search. You're not downsizing. You're right-sizing and that's a much more specific, much more solvable brief.

18/08/2026

Why Some Suburbs Quietly Take Off - And Stay Ahead

Some suburbs go from overlooked to sought-after over the space of a generation. It rarely comes down to one big thing - a new development or a train line - it's a slow accumulation of smaller changes.

A few signs worth watching for:

- Older character homes getting proper renovations, not just a coat of paint
- A café or bakery opening that wouldn't have lasted there a few years earlier and thriving
- Fewer big family homes changing hands, more couples and downsizers moving in
- The street starting to look, feel and sound different on a Saturday morning

None of this shows up in price data for a year or two. By the time it does, the suburb has usually already moved and the biggest gains have already gone to the people who bought early.

The suburbs that go through this transformation properly tend to have a few things in common: they're close to the CBD or the water, they've got a good stock of older, well-built homes with character, and there's already public investment happening - not just talked about.

If you're thinking long-term about where to buy, these quiet signals are worth far more attention than a headline growth number.

Thinking about a suburb that might be on this path? Send me a message - happy to talk it through.

13/08/2026

SA is a stand out performer; take a read.
It’s important to understand the market at a local level and not a blanket national lens.

One state has turned Australia’s property cooldown on its head, claiming six of the nation’s 10 hottest markets in a single quarter.

10/08/2026

Why use a buyer's agent?

Buying a property is one of the biggest financial decisions most people make and yet most people only do it a handful of times in their life. There's no real chance to get good at it. The market shifts, the process has its own quirks, and every purchase brings a fresh set of unknowns, no matter how much homework you do.

That's the whole point of a buyer's agent. Not to replace your judgement, but to sit alongside it with the market knowledge and process experience that comes from doing this every single day.

A few things worth knowing about what the job actually involves:

It's not just "finding houses."
Most buyers can find listings themselves - Google does that for free. What a buyer's agent adds is the filtering: knowing which of those forty listings are actually worth an inspection, and which ones will waste your Saturday. And in some cases, seeing properties before they're publicly listed at all, through relationships built over years of working the same patch.

Assessment matters more than access.
Finding a property is one thing. Knowing what it's actually worth, not what the agent is guiding, not the online estimate, but a genuine read on comparable sales and the specific quirks of that street, that block, that build - is another. This is where a lot of buyers get caught out, either overpaying in a hurry or underestimating a genuinely good property because it doesn't display well.

Negotiation is a skill, not a personality trait.
Being a "tough negotiator" isn't really what wins here. Understanding the vendor's position, the agent's incentives, and the property's actual weak points is what wins. That takes a level head and a bit of distance from the emotional pull of the property, which is very hard to have when it's your own money and your future home on the line.

There's also the harder to quantify part of the job: helping indecisive clients work through it. Property decisions tend to bring out competing fears, the fear of missing out on the right property, the fear of getting it wrong and buying the wrong one, and the fear of getting the timing wrong altogether. That last one can be the most paralysing, because there's no such thing as a perfect moment - waiting for one often just means watching prices move without you. Having someone who isn't emotionally attached to the outcome, and who can talk through the decision with a clear head, is often what helps a buyer over the line.

And then there's time.
The search, inspections, contract reviews, building and pest coordination, settlement logistics - it adds up to a genuinely substantial amount of legwork, particularly if you're doing it around a full-time job.

None of this means you can't buy well on your own. Plenty of people do. But if you're time poor, buying somewhere unfamiliar, or simply want someone in your corner who isn't paid by the vendor, that's the gap a buyer's agent fills and in turn, saves you money, by avoiding the overpaying, the missed red flags, and the costly second guessing that comes with going it alone.

At Property Finders Group, we work exclusively for buyers across metropolitan Adelaide, the Adelaide Hills and the Fleurieu Peninsula - genuinely local knowledge, built from actually living in these areas, not just settling them.