An Eastern Suburbs real estate view on selling your property by choice — not compulsion.
In 2003 I was bound to sell a property under a court order. My own reading of the market said the timing was poor — the heat was coming out of it, buyers had turned cautious, and every instinct I had said wait. None of that mattered. The order stood, the sale had to complete, and I took a house to market at a moment I would never have chosen. It sold. It always does. But it sold on the market’s terms rather than the vendor’s, and I have never forgotten the feeling of having no lever to pull.
That is the thing about a forced sale. The price is only half of it. The deeper cost is the loss of choice — the campaign you cannot lengthen, the offer you cannot refuse, the quiet season you cannot wait out. You are selling into whatever the market happens to be that month, and the market does not care about your reasons.
A forced sale takes your timing before it takes your money.
I have thought about that 2003 sale a good deal this year, because the conditions that create forced sellers are assembling again — slowly, and mostly out of sight.
What the numbers are actually saying
The Reserve Bank held the cash rate at 4.35 per cent at its June meeting, and the language around it was cautious rather than comforting — the Bank is weighing inflation it hasn’t fully tamed against households it doesn’t want to break. Cotality’s June figures had national dwelling values down 0.4 per cent, the sharpest monthly fall since late 2022. That is not a crash. It is a turn. And turns are where the forced-seller machinery starts to run.
None of this is a forecast of collapse, and I won’t pretend to know where the cash rate sits this time next year — the forecasters themselves are split, some tipping the next move is still up. What I do know, from thirty-five years of watching cycles land on real people, is who gets caught when a market softens and rates stay high. The refinance that no longer clears. The investment property whose sums stopped working the day the Budget changed the negative gearing and capital-gains treatment. The estate that must be wound up. The separation that cannot be paused. The development that has to settle on a timetable set by a bank, not a market.
Every one of those is a seller with no choice about timing. And every one of them would give a great deal to be selling now instead of then.
The pressure is already showing in the figures. Personal insolvencies rose 6.2 per cent in the March quarter, climbing in every state and territory, on the latest AFSA data. Company collapses ran at their highest level in roughly twenty-five years across 2024-25, on ASIC’s numbers, led by the construction trade. Home-loan arrears remain low overall, but the Reserve Bank’s own analysis has them rising quickest among the most leveraged borrowers — the ones with the least room to absorb a shock. This is what the early part of a turn looks like: not the headlines, but a quiet accumulation of people who are losing the luxury of choosing when they sell.
The two kinds of seller
There are really only two positions you can sell from. One is strength — you have chosen the moment, you have time, you have a plan, and if the right buyer doesn’t appear this month you can wait for the one who does. The other is compulsion — someone or something has set your timetable, and you are negotiating from the back foot before the first inspection.
The gap between those two positions is not small. It is the difference between running a proper campaign and accepting the first serious number. It is the difference between presenting a home at its best and presenting it as-is because the clock is running. Over a career and more than a thousand sales, I have watched that gap decide outcomes far more often than any granite benchmark or auction-day theatre ever did.
The best time to sell is while selling is still your idea.
The window that’s open now
Here is my view, plainly. Prices across the Eastern Suburbs are still near the top of the range they’ve held through this cycle. Rates are high but steady. Buyers with genuine capacity are still active, if more selective than they were. That combination — high prices, a pause rather than a plunge, real buyers still in the room — is exactly the window in which selling is a decision rather than a reaction.
It will not stay open indefinitely, and I don’t say that to manufacture urgency. I say it because I have seen the other side of it, and I would not wish a court-ordered timetable on anyone who had the option to move a season earlier.
What I’d actually do
If you are anywhere near a decision — downsizing, restructuring, winding up a holding, or simply sensing that this chapter is closing — the process I would take is unhurried and deliberate, which is the whole advantage of moving while you still can. Understand what your property is genuinely worth today, from someone with no listing to win from telling you. Sit with that number. Decide whether the reasons you’d sell are still reasons in a year. If they are, prepare properly — the right presentation, the right timing, a campaign built for your buyer rather than for a deadline. And if the answer is not yet, that is a perfectly good answer too. The point is that it remains yours to give.
That is the one advantage a forced seller never has, and the one I’d protect above almost any other. Choose your moment while the choice is still on the table.
