1989 in Canberra was a different time. Beer-skulling legend Bob Hawke was Prime Minister, Kylie Minogue was on screen in The Delinquents, and the ACT had just run its first self-governing elections.
Interest rates hit a record seventeen percent that May, but though the market was tough first home buyers were still getting on to the property ladder.
“One weekend, I bought the local newspaper and started reading the property descriptions to see if any jumped out at me,” Bruce recalls. “There were no pictures. All you had to go on was how well the agent could capture the property in words.”
“There was one—I couldn’t tell you what it said—but it caught my interest enough to call the Peter Blackshaw agent, who still only had words to describe it over the phone.”
Excited at the prospect of owning a home, Bruce setup a time with the agent to view the property for himself. “I remember the agent picking up my wife and I at home and driving us to see the house and that was how we became homeowners.”
“How’s that for service?”
If you can’t imagine hitching a lift with your agent to an open home, it’s because changes in technology mean we don’t have to visit a property to know whether it ticks our boxes.
Throughout the years, real estate in our city started to change in order to provide a better service to sellers and buyers, and Peter Blackshaw Real Estate was instrumental in that change.
We wanted to simplify the process and make it easier for buyers to decide if the property was the right fit and to provide sellers with more reach. One way we did this was introducing sketches, photography and later, colour photography to our newspaper ads and marketing materials.
One of the reasons we brought in more regulated, professional auctions in the ACT region, was to really ramp up competition for homes. It ultimately became one of the most popular sale methods in Canberra.
Even today we push limits to deliver the best experiences. This year we launched a new online property appraisal tool, ‘My Online Appraisal’, that provides a detailed, personalised and up-to-date appraisal within 24 hours.
For more insight on 30 years of industry changes, watch the video above as our agents relive decades of real estate in the city we love.