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.”
For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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