Sarah Kaye & Co. Buyers Agents

05/08/2026

Australia is now in its eleventh housing downturn in forty years, and most of the commentary treats every buyer the same. The data doesn't.

This one is investor-led. In the last comparable downturn, investor lending fell 49% while first-home buyer lending fell just 4% — and investors are expected to halve as a share of demand again. If you're buying a home to live in, what's actually changed is this: more homes to choose from, auctions clearing below 50%, and vendors who will negotiate. The premium end across the Northern Beaches, the Lower North Shore and the Upper North Shore is softening first, which matters if that's where your next home is.

The post covers the current state of the market, three myths worth dropping, and the outlook — separated for owner-occupiers and investors, because the answers are different. If you're weighing up a move this spring, we're happy to talk it through: sarahkaye.com.au

27/07/2026

There's a moment at every auction where the only thing that matters is discipline.

We were recently bidding for an Australian family living overseas, moving home to the Lower North Shore within the year. They couldn't be in the room, so they trusted us to be there for them.

We'd agreed their limit days earlier, a number set with a clear head, well away from the pressure of auction day. When the bidding pushed past $13 million, we reached that limit and stopped. The winning bid landed just $8,000 above ours.

At that level, $8,000 can feel like nothing. That's exactly why it matters. The temptation to throw in one more bid is where good buying quietly goes wrong. So we were the underbidder, and we'd make the same call again.

Buying with your head instead of your heart isn't about winning every auction. It's about knowing your number and being willing to walk away. There's always another home.

If you're buying on the Lower North Shore and want someone in your corner who'll hold the line, we'd love to hear from you.

10/06/2026

It's three weeks since the budget, and the most useful thing we can tell you is what nobody can tell you yet: what it has done to prices. The real measure — settled sale data from the Valuer General — lands about eight weeks after a deal is struck, so the figures in the news right now are mood, not proof.

What we do know is that the legislation has passed the House and is before a Senate committee, the start date is 1 July 2027, and most of the genuine impact sits with investors rather than owner-occupiers. For everyone else, interest rates, oil, construction costs and cost-of-living pressure are still the bigger story.

We're here whenever you'd like a calm read.

09/06/2026

Proud to be in print.

We were genuinely glad to be asked. Sydney Observer — the North Shore's leading lifestyle magazine, read by around 100,000 people across the corridor — approached us to write about the local property market, and our feature is in the current June issue (pages 38–39).

The June cover asks what the recent budget changes mean for North Shore property. It's a fair question, and the changes are real. But the argument we make in the article is one we've been sharing with clients for months: the budget is not the biggest story.

The softening that so many put down to budget night had been underway well before it. What actually moves your street is the wider picture — interest rates, the cost of building, what households can comfortably carry, and the balance of supply and demand.

If you're weighing a move on the Upper or Lower North Shore and want a calm, independent read on what the numbers really say, we'd be glad to talk.

📍 sarahkaye.com.au · 1300 500 053

08/06/2026

Eight in five weeks. Two more this week.

Eurobin Avenue, Manly. Woodcourt Road, Berowra Heights. Both quietly purchased over the past few days — on top of the six properties we secured for clients earlier this month, from Manly through to Gordon.
Director-led. Independent. Disciplined process. No kickbacks.

The market keeps making noise. The work keeps getting done. The buyers we work with aren't waiting for the news cycle to feel calmer before getting on with their lives — they're moving on their own terms, with calm advice and an evidence-led process behind them.

If you'd like to know what we're actually seeing on the ground, we'd be happy to talk.

05/06/2026

"How many properties have you bought in this specific suburb?"

It's a question more buyers in Sydney are being prompted to ask their buyers agent. The agencies pushing it hardest are the ones that can win on it. That isn't a coincidence — and it's worth understanding why before you sign with one of them.

There are two kinds of buyers agency. An advisory business is built around senior practitioners doing the work themselves, with a small number of clients and time to think. A transaction business is built on leverage — a principal who sells the work, junior staff who deliver most of it, throughput as the KPI. They are not different sizes of the same business. They are different businesses entirely.

The volume-in-the-suburb question is the transaction model's preferred way of pretending that distinction doesn't matter. The accountant analogy works: you wouldn't pick one because they have ten thousand clients. You'd assume you'd never get the time.

Seven beats from the full argument, in the slides.

sarahkaye.com.au

03/06/2026

There has been a run of property headlines this past fortnight worth checking. The North Shore has "crashed by more than 32 per cent." The Sydney market is "panicked." Australia is bracing for "the biggest housing correction in 40 years."

We work in Sydney's Northern Suburbs every day, and we sit on the NSW Valuer General's settled-sales record for the Northern Beaches, the Lower North Shore, and the Upper North Shore — 31,681 settled, arms-length transactions across the past two years. So we pulled the file and checked.

On the exact same 12-month window the 32 per cent figure uses, sixteen Lower North Shore suburb-by-property-type cuts have a robust sample in both years. The average year-on-year median change across all sixteen is −3.1 per cent. Some up — Cammeray houses +18.7 per cent, Neutral Bay houses +8.6 per cent. Some down — Northbridge houses −13.8 per cent, Mosman houses −9.8 per cent. And one cut in a class of its own — Kirribilli units, −31.3 per cent. Take Kirribilli out and the other fifteen cuts average −1.2 per cent.

The headline picked the single most extreme line out of sixteen and ran it as the regional story. Inside Kirribilli itself, the move is largely composition — one new development settling in the prior period, a thinner prestige middle in the recent, and trophy stock that has actually held its line. None of it is a like-for-like collapse.

If you are buying in our patch, the headlines you read this fortnight are about a different market.

Full Sarah Kaye & Co Research piece on the blog at sarahkaye.com.au.

03/06/2026

Construction costs are still rising — and so is construction risk.
Most buyers follow the cost-to-build story. ABS data has house construction input prices up 3.2% over the past year, with industry forecasts pointing to another ~4% rise across Sydney through 2026. Levels remain well above pre-pandemic. New apartment approvals nationally fell 26% in March 2026 — a clear feasibility signal.

But the quality story is the other half of the picture. The NSW Government's strata defects survey found that 40–50% of NSW strata apartments built since the mid-2010s have had at least one serious defect. Waterproofing and fire safety lead the list. Coastal stock is over-represented. Special levies of $30,000–$100,000+ per lot are not unusual.

These two stories meet in the same offer. The price you pay reflects what it costs to build today. The price you keep reflects what was built well. We help buyers across Sydney's Northern Suburbs read both. If you're weighing what to buy in this market, we'd be glad to read the building with you.

01/06/2026

Same suburbs, different market. We've now tracked ten years of apartment sales across Sydney's Northern Suburbs at Sarah Kaye & Co Research.

7,400-plus arms-length unit transactions across Wahroonga, Mosman, and Manly between 2016 and 2026, the 12-month rolling median tracked month by month.

Manly apartments are the most expensive of the three at both ends of the decade. They've also grown the least. Mosman apartments grew the most. Wahroonga in between.

For houses, Mosman trailed. For apartments, the order flips — Manly is the slowest grower despite being the most expensive. The pattern across both posts: in our patch, the most prestigious postcode isn't automatically the strongest capital-growth play. It's true for the harbour-front in one market, and the beach-front in the other.

Source: NSW Valuer General sales data.

29/05/2026

Sydney property prices have fallen. Sydney property prices are holding up. Both headlines have run in the same paper this autumn — and both are right, just not about the same part of Sydney.

We pulled five months of NSW Valuer General data — the legal settlement record, not the agent-disclosed numbers — across the three sub-regions we cover. Northern Beaches: steady. Lower North Shore: softer across the board. Upper North Shore: the most interesting story this cycle.

The first edition of the Sydney's Northern Suburbs price tracker. Read the data, then make your own call.
Radically Honest. Fiercely on Your Side.

Five months of NSW Valuer General registered-sales data across the Northern Beaches, the Lower North Shore and the Upper North Shore, read side by side. The Northern Beaches has held its level. The Lower North Shore has softened. The Upper North Shore is doing something the headlines miss.