AJ Buyers Agent

03/09/2026

I used to daydream about winning Powerball.

Not the yacht. Just the choices. The freedom of not having to think about Money.

I've bought a ticket most weeks for years. Still do, occasionally. But somewhere along the way the daydream changed.

It stopped being about more stuff as i have enough of it, well ok the new XL Gosney Pizza oven to add to my BBQ collection would be nice.

But These days what I actually want is fairly ordinary: doing life on my own terms, the family looked after, my health in check, and being able to hook the off-grid caravan up and disappear for a few weeks. Or point my Red MX-5 somewhere with corners and take the long way home.

That's it. That's the list.

And the thing that struck me is that most of it isn't a Powerball problem. It's a structure problem.

I work with people in their sixties and seventies sitting on a house worth three, four, five million dollars in Sydney. Asset rich. Cash poor. Rattling around in five bedrooms because moving feels like more trouble than it's worth.

The money for the list is already there. It's in the walls.

Downsizing done properly doesn't shrink your life. It converts an asset you're maintaining into a life you're actually living. Fewer rooms to clean, fewer stairs to climb, and enough freed up to sort the kids out, stay on top of your health, and go where you want for as long as you want.

You don't need the numbers to come up.

You just need to know what the move would leave you with — and to do it once, properly, rather than putting it off for another year.

I built the Downsizer Equity Calculator (see the Link in the comments) for the first part. The second part is what I do for a living.

When are you thinking of Downsizing?

27/08/2026

3am. Bare feet. One brick nobody picked up.

Every parent knows the sound you make trying not to wake the house.

That's usually the moment the thought lands: we've outgrown this place.

And then the other thought lands right behind it — but we'll get less for our home than we would have two years ago.

Here's what most families miss.

When you sell and buy in the same market, the sale price isn't the number that matters. The gap between the two is.

Sell for less, buy for less. A softer market shrinks that gap in dollar terms. Trading up into a hot market is the expensive version.

What actually costs families is the years spent waiting for a certainty that never quite arrives.

I know the version of this that doesn't fit on a spreadsheet.

A two-bedroom semi. One son running havoc through it, and a second on the way. Saturday opens with a four-year-old and a very pregnant partner. Working backwards from childcare, then primary, then which high school catchment we'd be locked into for the next decade.

We landed at 20 Milford St, Randwick. 2008. A deceased estate, $1.9m. Shagpile carpet, honeycomb walls, Formica benchtops — a 1960s build that needed a full Reno.

My partner said it had potential. Capital P. I was fairly sure the P stood for profit.

She was right. But we only got the chance at it because someone picked up the phone before it hit the portals.

The other thing nobody warns you about: sell first and you've got nowhere to live, so you rent, then move again a few months later. Two removal trucks, a storage unit, a lease. Buy first and you're carrying two loans. With a newborn in the house, moving twice isn't a budget problem. It's a survival problem.

I've built a calculator that works out the most you can actually pay — every cost of the move included, current NSW duty rates, your suburbs. Takes about a minute and you don't need to leave an email to see your number.

Link in the comments.

If your house has stopped fitting your family, what's actually holding you back — the price gap, or the school catchment?

21/08/2026

After sitting through hundreds of Eastern Suburbs auctions, here's the one thing that separates downsizers who get it right from those who don't.

It isn't budget. It isn't timing the market.

It's the ones who decide what they want their life to look like before they start looking at properties.

The couple who knows they want to walk to the beach, be near the grandkids, and never climb another set of stairs — they buy well. They can say no to the wrong place in ten minutes.

The couple who starts with "let's see what's out there" is still looking eighteen months later, more tired and more confused than when they started.

Clarity first. Property second.

CTA: If you're thinking about the next move, start with the life — I'll help you find the house that fits it.

19/08/2026

The invisible listings

You won't find these on Domain.

When I take on a new client, the first thing I build is a full picture of their suburb — and most of it is stuff you'll never see on a portal:

→ How long every listing has actually been on market
→ Properties that were listed, didn't sell, and quietly disappeared
→ What each one was originally asking, and where the price moved

That last group is where the opportunities are. A withdrawn listing is a motivated owner who's already had their expectations adjusted by the market — they just aren't advertising it anymore.

I've recorded a short walkthrough of a real one I built for a client. 👇

https://www.loom.com/share/802cbb9654994352923e0794aad862de

If you'd like this done for the suburb you're searching in, send me a message.

AJ

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18/08/2026

"Three hours, max."
That's what I said out loud, walking into Bunnings on a Sunday morning to buy the bits for a job I had no business doing.

You know the smell before you're through the doors. Onions, sausage, BBQ sauce. Gets me every time.

I went in for the DIY gear.

I came out with a snag, a cordless thing I already own a version of, two plants nobody asked for, and roughly half of what I actually went in for.

Three hours became a weekend.

The weekend became a second trip to Bunnings, a third trip to Bunnings, and a bloke named Dave who charged me more to fix it than he would have charged me to do it properly the first time.

Dave was very polite about it.

I've done this before. I'll probably do it again.

And every time I sit there afterwards and think: you knew. You actually knew.

So why do we do it?

In my experience there are three reasons, and most of us are at least one of them:

→ You're a tightarse. Paying someone feels like losing. Even when it isn't.
→ You're too smart for your own good. You research it to death, you read every forum, you build the spreadsheet — and then you don't move. Analysis paralysis dressed up as diligence.
→ You genuinely believe you're better at it than you are. This one's the killer, because there's no warning light. You only find out at the end.

Now here's the part that matters.

A botched DIY job is a cheap lesson. A few hundred dollars, a wasted weekend, and some wounded pride.

Buying the wrong home when you downsize is not a cheap lesson.

It's the difference between the right place in the right street that suits you for the next twenty years — and one you quietly resent by year three, that you can't easily undo without paying stamp duty all over again.

I've watched people spend eighteen months "just looking" because they were sure they'd know the right one when they saw it. I've watched people pay $80,000 too much because they didn't know what the vendor actually needed, and competed on price alone.

Neither of them thought they were making a mistake at the time. That's the whole problem.

Which one are you — the tightarse, the overthinker, or the overconfident?
Be honest. I'll go first: I'm all three, depending on the day.

17/08/2026

He was just bringing the bins in.

74 years old. On blood thinners. One misstep on the driveway and there was blood everywhere.

His wife found him. She's been telling him for years — let someone else do it.

But he's from that generation. Worked hard his whole life. Built things. Fixed things. Never called a tradie for anything he could do himself.
And in his head, he's still 45.

Last month he was up the ladder cleaning the gutters.
Here's the part nobody says out loud.
It's not only stubbornness. It's arithmetic.

A handyman is $80–$120 an hour. Gutters twice a year. Lawns fortnightly. Someone to clear the roof valleys, replace the downlight, trim the hedge he used to knock over in an afternoon.

That's real money out of a pension — and the pension is what they're living on. Because the wealth isn't in the bank. It's in the walls.
Three million dollars of it. Sitting in a house that costs him money every month and asks him to climb a ladder to keep it.

Asset rich. Cash poor. So he does it himself. Not because he's reckless — because paying someone else feels like money he doesn't have.

And here's what the data says about that decision.
A man of 45 comes off the third rung and gets a sore shoulder and a story. At 74, on blood thinners, it doesn't stop.

Fall hospitalisations in Australia, per 100,000 people:
At 49 — 383
At 74 — 1,789
At 84 — 4,850

Nearly five times higher at 74 than at 49. Thirteen times by 84. And it climbs every five years without asking permission.

Ladders are where men separate from the pack: 95.8 hospitalisations per 100,000 men over 65, against 26.4 for women. Nearly four to one.

Yet 96% of older Australians still use a ladder every year. 61% every month.
The ladder didn't get more dangerous. He did.

Downsizing isn't giving up. It's an arithmetic fix.

The four-bedroom sells. The single-level apartment or the low-maintenance villa costs less. The difference comes out of the walls — and what happens to it from there is a conversation for you and your adviser.

The handyman goes away.
No more ladders. No gutters. No roof valleys. No steps to the front door.

He gets his Saturdays back. She stops holding her breath every time she hears him in the garage.

He's 74 and telling you he's fine. At 74 he's nearly five times more likely to end up in emergency from a fall than the bloke he still thinks he is.

The house was never the retirement plan. It was just where the retirement plan was stored.

Let's stop filling emergency departments with injuries a floor plan could have prevented.

If you, your spouse or your parent is still on ladders at 74 because the money's locked in the house, that's a solvable problem. And it's the one I solve.

Still feel overwhelmed by it?

I help Downsizers cut through the Overwhelm and make it an easier process.

No stress. No drama. Just retirement on your terms, not dictated by a maintenance-heavy home.

12/08/2026

"We'll upsize when we can afford the loan."

Then they never actually check what "afford" means.

Most upsizers I meet have done exactly one thing.

Asked their own bank.

The bank ran its calculator. Gave them a number. The number didn't stretch to the house they wanted.

So they stopped.

Here's what nobody told them.

That number isn't the market. It's one lender's policy, on one day, run through one servicing calculator.

I sat down with a mortgage broker last week to go through what's actually on the table right now:

→ 40-year loan terms. Lower repayment on the same debt, which directly changes what the servicing test will let you borrow.

→ Fixed rates with 100% offset, split across multiple accounts. So the proceeds from your current home can work against the new loan while you sort out the timing of the move.

→ Owner-occupier lending up to 98% LVR. The deposit gap isn't always the thing standing between you and the next house.

→ Self-employed low-doc up to $5m. If your income is lumpy, or the last two years of returns don't reflect where the business is now.

None of that is exotic. It's just not what you hear when you walk into one branch and ask one question.

I'm not a broker and I don't give credit advice. That's not my lane.

But I've watched too many families put the upsize off for three years off the back of a single number from a single lender.

Three years the kids spent in a house that didn't fit them.

The house was never the problem. The structure was.

If you've been told no, get a second opinion on the borrowing side before you decide the move is off. Happy to introduce you to a broker who looks past the first answer.

Then let's talk about what you're actually buying.

11/08/2026

If you’re planning to upsize, a falling market is not bad news. It’s the whole point. ⬆️

Run the numbers.

Say you own an apartment worth $1.4m and you’re moving into a $2.8m house. The market drops 5% across the board.

You lose $70,000 on the sale.
You save $140,000 on the purchase.
You’re $70,000 in front.

And right now it’s better than that, because the falls aren’t even.

Sydney houses are falling faster than units, and the premium end is falling fastest of all.

The gap you have to bridge is narrowing — which is exactly what an upsizer wants.

The buyers who did best out of the last correction weren’t the ones who timed the bottom. They were the ones who were ready to move while everyone else was reading headlines and waiting.

If upsizing is on your two-year horizon, let’s talk about what your gap actually looks like now!

DM me for more info

AJ

01/08/2026

Missing half your Saturday inspections?

It’s not the traffic.

Twelve opens.

Half of them overlapping. Spread across four suburbs.

A dash from Bondi to Bellevue Hill that ends with three inspections missed and a lukewarm flat white in the cupholder.

That’s a normal Saturday for most people searching in the Eastern Suburbs.

It doesn’t have to be.

If you’re already saving open times into your calendar — Google, Apple, Outlook, doesn’t matter — you can hand the entire scheduling problem to Claude and get a proper run sheet back in under a minute.

Here’s the prompt. Copy it word for word:

PLEASE CREATE THE OPTIMISED ROUTE FOR VIEWING THE PROPERTY INSPECTIONS I HAVE IN MY CALENDAR TODAY, ASSUMING 5 MINS IN EACH PROPERTY.
I’M STARTING FROM [YOUR ADDRESS]. SHOW ARRIVAL TIMES AND DRIVE TIMES, AND FLAG ANY I’LL HAVE TO DROP.
THEN PUT THE ROUTE INTO GOOGLE MAPS.

The Google Maps bit is the part people miss.

That last line matters. Claude will hand you a Maps link with every stop already loaded in order — live traffic, live parking, turn-by-turn for the whole morning.

Save it to your phone and you’re not touching it again until you’re standing in the first hallway.

Is five minutes really enough?

For a first pass, yes. Five minutes tells you whether the light is right, whether the lift is where they said it was, whether the noise from the road is a problem, and whether you want a second look. It’s not enough to make a decision. It’s exactly enough to make a shortlist.

The properties that survive the shortlist deserve a proper inspection — mid-week, quiet, no crowd, and preferably with someone asking the questions the brochure doesn’t answer.

That second visit is the one that matters.

The Saturday run is just triage, and triage should be efficient.

If you’re struggling to get it working, DM me OPENS and I’ll talk you through it.