Hot property

Almost everything I’ve missed most about Australia during the past two decades have been simple pleasures, from family and friends to consistently amazing coffee, Turkish toast with Vegemite, summers filled with cricket and tennis and skiving off work, and the country’s particularly and peculiarly irreverent sense of humor.

But there’s something more complex I missed: the insane property market.

During my first stint in Sydney back in the mid-1990s, I rented a unit in a converted wool store for a price I now can’t remember. But the dream was a terrace home in Paddington: one like this, which sold for $A285,000 in 1993 and is within walking distance of bills, the late Bill Granger’s first restaurant which happened to open the same year and went on to change the face of Aussie cafe culture.

Thirty-odd years ago, $A285,000 seemed an impossible sum relative to my salary of something like $A50,000 a year. Cobbling together a deposit was one hurdle; mortgage rates hovering around 10% another. …