Frances Cook

Lovely to be here.

I mean, I think it's somewhat expected.

We did have the flood of developments, which were very needed, but it all sort of followed one general type of house.

There was a real flood of townhouses specifically.

And I think when you dive into the details of what's happening here with the house price falls, I mean,

Property is down across the board, but what we're really seeing here is when we have the much smaller townhouses, maybe the two bedrooms, the ones that don't have parking spaces, those are the ones that are being particularly hit hard here.

It's not necessarily all townhouses are down.

When you see things like the three bedrooms, they've got a decent backyard and they've got car parking.

They're hitting sort of around about the same as the rest of the property market.

It is those much smaller townhouses, the cheaper builds that were being targeted by investors or very sort of marginal first home buyers.

Those have really been hit and that is really hard for people.

Yeah, I think it's a really good reminder that property is supposed to be a very long-term bet financially, whether you're thinking of it as an investment or a home.

And those two things can be very different financially.

But either way, it is supposed to be quite long-term.

And I think when we're doing things like...

skipping the car parks or making it a very small floor plan.

One of the other things that often impacts, you know, they're seeing, it's quite interesting, the devil in the detail here, where the townhouses sort of on the ends of a row are often holding more value because they get more sunlight.

And so I think it really comes back to the fundamentals of people don't just want to live anywhere.

They do still want good quality housing.

And when you have a big bubbly boom, like what happened in 2021,