How to prepare your property for sale in a trade shortage
Achieving your maximum sale price is still possible, even if tradies are thin on the ground
4 min
Preparing a home for sale has never been more challenging. A construction crisis means materials and trades are pricier and harder to come by so renovation budgets and timelines are blowing out. Trade portal hipages.com.au recently reported that 85 percent of tradespeople on their site have had to raise their rates this year as timber and metal prices soar in the wake of a global supply chain crisis, coupled with a scarcity of skilled labour and trades.
CoreLogic’s Cordell Construction Cost Index revealed that building expenses increased 9 percent over the 12 months to March, the highest annual growth rate since the introduction of the GST in 2001.
Property stylist Justine Wilson of Vault Interiors says mammoth renovations should be shelved for sellers on a tight timeline right now.
“Almost across the board, everything from materials to furniture is taking longer to source,” she says. “What used to be a one-month lead time is turning into 14, 16 or sometimes 24 weeks.
It’s doubling or tripling the standard time and that has a flow on effect for anyone trying to renovate for sale, she says, but there are multiple fixes vendors can undertake to add value quickly.
“See what you can do on a cosmetic level before knocking out walls and attempting things that are going to need trades,” Wilson says. “You can give your place a facelift with styling or a fresh coat of paint rather than structural changes.”
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Refresh your strongest selling points
While the old adage says kitchens sell houses, Justine Wilson says vendors needn’t install a new one.
“Kitchens and bathrooms will always entice buyers so have them looking as fresh as possible. If you can’t order a whole new kitchen then use laminate paint to update cupboards, change out door hardware and consider peel and stick tile options to modernise really dated splashbacks. You could also swap out older benchtops and choose a laminate or Caesarstone top because they seem to be in ample supply at the moment.”
Home offices are also an asset in a post-pandemic marketplace.
“Whether it’s a nook under the stairs or a self-contained study it will appeal to buyers because people want an office or media zone separate to the rest of their family,” Wilson says. “You can get freestanding prefab pods, convert a garage, or garden shed rather than going through the expensive and long process of getting something approved and built.”
Take it outside
According to the recent Great Australian Backyard survey by Adbri Masonry, 80 percent of respondents said an entertaining space out back plays an important, or very important, part in decision making when buying a property.
“The outdoor dining and entertaining area is a staple for every Aussie home because it adds a new dimension to how you can entertain while enhancing the appeal of your home,” says landscaping expert and Adbri Masonry brand ambassador, Jason Hodges.
Since timber and carpenters are hard to come by, he suggests refreshing your outdoor area with pavers with a high pressure hose down.
“If you have a paved or decked area, you can give it a clean to inject new life,” he says. “If you’re starting with a blank canvas, consider creating your own aesthetic with a small format paver such as Havenbrick, which allows you to create different patterns with a variety of colour tones to choose from. Also, adding a cosy fire pit as part of your outdoor entertaining area means your space becomes usable all year round.”
A veggie patch can also add to the family-friendly nature of a home, as can embracing a wellbeing element, like a meditation space.
“The beauty of the backyard is its diversity,” Hodges says. “With a little effort and a dash of creativity it can be transformed into the space which is right for you, be it a Zen garden or sleek entertaining area. It’s yours to define. Plus, it can reap financial rewards when selling.”
Invest in styling for maximum ROI
Staging a home for sale is a quick, temporary fix which often means you can avoid the wait for trades. Stylists like Justine Wilson have warehouses of items ready to go so a tired listing can be revived within days rather than weeks or months.
“Styling adds value when you’re presenting your home for sale and can completely uplift a property without any renovation,” she says. “If you can’t redo your kitchen or bathroom then look at putting that money into the best presentation possible,” she says.
Window dressings like these custom made blinds from Tuiss can be ordered online and are suitable for DIY installation
Homeowners can start by making sure the house is neat and decluttered, the carpet is steam cleaned and windows are washed. Even the smell of the home has proven to help with the sale. A study by UK-based real estate agent comparison site GetAgent revealed which scents sell homes. Top aromas included freshly baked bread (with 37 percent of respondents claiming it would entice them to buy), followed by fresh linen (36 per cent), freshly brewed coffee (27 per cent), new carpet and freshly cut grass (both 25 percent).
“You could go a step further and have your home professionally staged so that it stands out online,” Wilson says. “We’ve seen anywhere from a 5 percent to 20 percent increase in the sale price after presenting a home well.”
She says to view styling not so much as an expense, but more of an investment.
“By presenting the space correctly, with the right flow, function, and scale of furniture, it can help buyers who have trouble visualising its potential.”
The Swiss watchmaker’s first collaboration with Atlassian Williams F1 Team produces two sporting Laureato models inspired by the team’s 2026 racing car.
Victorian auction buyers will soon receive a piece of information that has traditionally been withheld until bidding reaches it: the vendor’s reserve price. Under new property-sale and underquoting laws, agents must publish the agreed reserve at least seven days before an auction or fixed-date sale. Most changes begin on 1 October 2026 and apply to …
Continue reading “Victoria’s New Auction Rules Will Force Reserve Prices Into the Open”
AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
As housing drives wealth and policy debate, the real risk is an economy hooked on growth without productivity to sustain it.
The Swiss watchmaker’s first collaboration with Atlassian Williams F1 Team produces two sporting Laureato models inspired by the team’s 2026 racing car.
