Sil­ver­back. Not entirely sure what this is, but resize the win­dow to see some coded bril­liance. How to recre­ate the effect.

Now that our rental lease is offi­cially up Ange and I have been ded­i­cat­ing a bit more time to check­ing out the real estate mar­ket. Last week­end (for the first time) we went out and the north­ern edge of the city look­ing for a pos­si­ble new res­i­dence. We looked at a hand­ful of houses that ranged from decent to down right dis­gust­ing. One house in par­tic­u­lar smelled like a grungy pub toi­let. And the smell wasn’t com­ing from the moldy, car­peted bathroom.

While I’m on that, if you’re going to hold an open house inspec­tion you need to make sure the occu­pants will leave the house. We walked into one house in Reser­voir to find the elderly ten­ants hud­dled around the tele­vi­sion in the front room. This meant that:

a) we couldn’t get a good idea of the size of the front room as it was chock full of Slim Dusty brand tilt­ing armchairs;

b) we kept wait­ing for one of the oldies to turn around and tell us off for touch­ing their dusty, dis­used memorabilia.

It didn’t help that the house was swarm­ing with piles of garbage either.

The last house we saw was back in Pas­coe Vale, about 400 metres from where we cur­rently live. From the out­side it looked pretty good, all red brick and arches, but once we got inside it was another story. Of the two and a half bed­rooms only one had a wardrobe that only opened when I threw my shoul­der into it. Plas­ter joins in every room were cracked and a lot of the door han­dles were bro­ken or just not work­ing right. The house seemed to be held together by luck and good intentions.

The bath­room was big enough for a bath­tub, a sink and not much more. The laun­dry, on the other hand, was twice the size of the bath­room and fea­tured a toi­let! In short that place was going to need a lot of money poured into it to be liveable.

Once we were back in the front yard the auc­tion began. The auc­tion­eer went through the usual waivers and cavets, talked up the house and block and then started the bid­ding. Except nobody would start. I sus­pect most of the peo­ple there, like us, were bystanders. Just there for a sticky beak.

Even­tu­ally the auc­tion­eer decided on a start­ing ven­dor bid of $400,000. The crowd, which had been a quiet mur­mur went dead silent. Every­one was think­ing the same thing. Was this guy insane?

Of course nobody put their hand up and it wasn’t long til the auc­tion­eer began to look wor­ried. Then it hap­pened, some guy to my right, maybe a lit­tle crazy, maybe a lit­tle bored put his hand up.

“$410,000.”

The auc­tion­eer smiled. He waved his arms around, try­ing to squeeze more bids out of the crowd. He had us now, or so he thought. Nobody budged. Maybe he fig­ured we thought the house was too cheap because he threw in another ven­dor bid. The house was now going for $420,000. The man to my right put in another bid: $421,000. The auc­tion­eer sneered and asked him to stop play­ing games. Col­lec­tively we, bystanders and bid­ders alike, were think­ing the same thing about him.

The man bid again: $425,000. The auc­tion­eer accepted this bid and set to work­ing the crowd up again. After three calls and no more bids he fin­ished off the auction.

It was then that he let the ball drop: the house hadn’t reached the intan­gi­ble reserve price. I think we were all beyond car­ing at that point. The crowd dis­persed and we all went our sep­a­rate ways, while the lone bid­der “nego­ti­ated” with the chain-smoking owner.

It was later that night that Ange pulled up the house’s list­ing on domain.com.au. The house was still listed, but the page had been updated with the reserve price: an incred­u­lous $465,000!

To me it was obvi­ous that the real estate bub­ble has burst. The Sun­day Her­ald Sun even pointed this out on the front page. The mar­ket is shift­ing. It just seems that every­body except the agents recog­nise this.

Breath­tak­ing Typo­graphic Posters. Smash­ing Mag­a­zine brings the goods again.

Indi­ana Jones and the King­dom of the Crys­tal Skull Teaser. Do I really need to comment?

6/365, orig­i­nally uploaded by The Blue­Boy.

The real estate/landlord can­celled last weekend’s house inspec­tion 30 min­utes before they were due to arrive. They’ve resched­uled for this week­end, so now we’re going through and giv­ing the house a quick once over just in case they decide to show up this time.