Prestige Property: 18 Macgregor Avenue, Portsea VIC
This coveted coastal home boasts the ultimate pool house.
This coveted coastal home boasts the ultimate pool house.
Located in one of Portsea’s most coveted streets, this elegant coastal home — designed by legendary Australian architect, Guildford Bell — is privately set back from the street with farm gates and a white pebble drive giving nothing away.
Beyond the Moonah trees, atop the cliff, appears the 5-bedroom, 5-bathroom, 2-car garage home, built upon approximately 2965sqm of land only minutes’ walk to Shelley Beach.
The inspiring entrance — with an internal courtyard — provides a sense of arrival for what is a meticulously presented single level home, with a classic coastal getaway feel.
The property features the main house, complete with 4-bedrooms and 4-bathrooms, and boasts light-timber floors and panelling on the walls, with a vaulted ceiling in the living room further adding to the home’s coastal allure.
Here, the home’s airy design — courtesy of the light palette of white and blonde — hosts a luxurious entertaining space dominated by the kitchen, which features a combination of blonde timbers and stone veneers. Also here, the living space sees a fireplace for chillier nights while sliding glass doors allow for seamless access to the outdoor entertaining area.
Elsewhere, the home’s accommodation is broken up into wings, with one flank of the house holding three bedrooms, two of which hold their own ensuites. The opposite side of the house sees the master suite complete built-in robes, expansive coastal themed ensuite and private study.
Outside is a scene from a Mediterranean village, with the alfresco entertaining area adorned by bougainvillea and a stretch of rolling green turf.
Beyond the immediate outdoor area, the property is privy to its very own, resort-style pool house. Completely equipped and self-contained, the pavilion sees its own sunken lounge —ideal for relaxing with a Mai Tai — alongside the pool itself. The accommodation features its own open living space with fireplace, galley style kitchenette and bedroom with ensuite.
Further features offered by the property include the double lock up garage, with off-street parking for four additional cars, CCTV, fully irrigated garden with bore water, garden lighting, wired in audio system and more.
The listing is with Patrick Skin (+61 418 378 759) and Rob Curtain (+61 418 310 870) of Peninsula Sotheby’s International Realty. Price guide; $8.75 million – $9.5 million. Melbournesothebysrealty.com
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.
Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.
Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.
Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.
“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.
Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.
In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.
Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.
Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.
In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .
The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.