From the country to the coast
Buyers are falling in love with the many charms of Mollymook
5 min
Mollymook is a small town cooking up a huge reputation. Although its permanent population sits at about 3,500, thousands more descend on the coastal patch and surrounding villages each year for a slice of its laidback lifestyle and five star culinary offerings.
Like its beachside peers across the country, Mollymook on NSW’s South Coast turned heads during the pandemic years. City slickers narrowed in on the space, serenity and affordability of the region transforming the sleepy holiday town into a desirable destination among more permanent buyers.
A return to normal
In 2020, the median house prices in Mollymook Beach and Mollymook were $785,000 and $750,000 respectively.
By the time the property cycle hit its peak in 2021 those figures
had almost doubled. Domain data reported that Mollymook Beach clocked up the highest house price growth of any suburb in Australia over the five years to July 2022, registering an incredible 106 per cent price hike.
Today, however, the extraordinary flight to the country has eased with
interest rate rises pouring water on boiling house prices.
While down 2.4 percent from peak prices, Mollymook’s house median is still $1.22 million while Mollymook Beach sits at $1.05 million, down a significant 21.3 per cent over the same period according to REA Group data.
Andrea Tucker, principal of McGrath Estate Agents Mollymook said the region has travelled through a price adjustment and is coming out the other side.
“We’re still ahead if you round those figures up,” she says. We’re really trading back in a normal market after quite a bullish time.
“There’s a little caution from buyers now, but they’re still quite active in the market. They’re
just sitting back waiting for opportunities, particularly if they’re looking for investment properties.”
Tucker adds that when it comes to home prices, Mollymook has several sweet spots.
“If you can pick up anything in Mollymook under $1 million, you’ll have people all over it,” she says. “Then you go up in gradients but once it gets over $2 million the buyer pool starts to thin out.”
Local agents place the luxury market in excess of $3 million, however in the heady days of 2021, a beachfront house in Mollymook sold for $10 million via online auction. Just five years prior, the same four-bedroom house at 15 Shipton Crescent was bought for $2.26 million.
Dishing up the good life
In addition to its popular surf beach, Mollymook has a large natural rock pool known as the Bogey Hole and Mollymook Golf Club maintains two prized golf courses; an 18-hole championship course known as the Hilltop and a smaller 9-hole beachside course.
“One of the beautiful things about living here is you’re less than 10 minutes from the beach or the countryside. We’re really blessed,” Tucker says. “Not to mention we’re quite spoilt for fantastic restaurants.”
In 2009, English celebrity chef Rick Stein put Mollymook on the national food map when he opened his first Australian restaurant, Rick Stein at Bannisters. Other high-profile restaurants include the Asian-inspired Gwylo and The Beachside Bistro with nearby fine dining spots such as Cupitts Estate and Small Town are also attracting the tourist trade.
With the food scene flourishing, the accommodation landscape is developing in Mollymook too. Earlier this year, Motel Molly became the latest in a string of revived retro motels across the country. Following the multi- million-dollar refurbishment of a former beachside motel by Knox Developments and Richards Stanisich — also responsible for refitting historic Sydney joints Hotel Rose Bay as well as The Woollahra Hotel.
Sensing its saleability, developers are also waking up to Mollymook. Peniche, a four-storey luxury development of eight three- bedroom apartments, was given the green light by Shoalhaven Council in early 2023. The
project at 1 Buchan Street is currently being marketed through McGrath Mollymook and is set for completion in late 2024.
Its perks will include a shared pool, views to the ocean as well as Mollymook golf course with prices starting at $1.75 million.
Holiday home trends
Local buyer’s agent, Matt Knight of Precium, says while investors making the most of the tourism trade had stepped back after a flurry of activity post-COVID, there still is a holiday home market in Mollymook.
“While we’ve seen a softening in tourist numbers, they’re still very large tourist numbers. When international borders were shut there was a captive audience of tourists with nowhere to go except for where they could drive to. As a result, we had a very high hotel and holiday home occupancy rates and a subsequent massive spike in prices,” he said.
Airdna, which analyses the performance of short-term rental properties listed on Stayz and Airbnb, revealed that by December 2022, demand for Mollymook Beach holiday rentals was down 27 percent for January compared to
the previous summer. As Australians began venturing abroad once again, owners invested in the short term rental market started rethinking their strategies according to Knight.
“The Airbnb occupancy rate has dropped a little and some of those properties have come back to a more normal holiday vacancy rate,” he says. “A few people may have decided in response to pull their property off the holiday let market and put in a permanent tenant, particularly in the light of all the interest rate rises. So that’s caused a bit of an easing in the long term rental market.”
What buyers want
House hunters turning to Mollymook cover a wide cross section, Tucker explains, but the hottest properties are four-bedroom houses with retirees, investors and families all in the mix.
“I get really excited about the young professionals still moving here,” Tucker says. “We had a lot come through COVID, and although some have had their corporate companies claw them back into the office, they’re still coming.
“They’ve had their eyes opened. They realise they can take up surfing, there are smaller class sizes for their kids, they’re not spending so much time in traffic.
“There’s still a lot of enticement for young professionals to move here.” Knight agrees the stream of buyers is a mixed bag from expats hoping to return Down Under, to retirees and digital nomads.
“There’s still a small number of people leaving the cities because they can work from home. I’d say the volume has gone down, but it’s still there and people are making real estate choices based on that,” he says, adding that Mollymook and its surrounds has something not all quiet coastal towns can offer.
“It’s really become a place where a sophisticated buyer, who wants the beach but also the mod cons of life, can have it all. Whereas some of the more remote beaches are beautiful, but they just have a little general store.”
Ultimately, Mollymook’s “critical mass” offers something for almost everyone according to Knight.
“I left Sydney more than 15 years ago and raised four children down here. It’s actually a viable area with schooling options and an economy that’s holding its own. It’s not just a one-club town for retirees, it certainly appeals to a wider age demographic and a wider set of expectations.”
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
4 min
OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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International AI strategist Justin Kabbani will headline the Kanebridge Property Summit in Sydney on June 18, with tickets selling fast.
