By Brendan Leahy, Naked Real Estate®
I make my living selling Bedfordale property, so read this knowing I have an interest in you calling me. What I can offer in return is that the story below starts with me telling a seller not to spend more than $60,000 preparing her home for sale, because I did not believe she needed to.
If you want to know what your Bedfordale property is worth, start here: Bedfordale is not one market.
Two properties that look identical on paper can be worth very different money. Four bedrooms on five acres, both of them. One has five genuinely usable acres. The other is steep enough that only a fraction of it is practical. One has scheme water. The other runs on tanks, a bore and a dam. One has a proper workshop and good truck access. The other has a beautiful view and nowhere to put anything.
And sometimes the house is not the most valuable part of the property at all.
Why Bedfordale is hard to compare
There are several different Bedfordale markets sitting inside the one postcode.
Around Wallangarra and nearby, lifestyle and equestrian properties commonly sit on roughly three to six acres. Around Cairns Road, Carradine Road and the older rural parts, blocks run to ten acres and considerably more. Then there are the newer lifestyle estates, homes on roughly 3,000 to 4,000 square metres, often with scheme water and a modern build.
Those attract three different buyers with three different budgets and three different priorities.
Before I even walk through the house I am looking at how much of the land is genuinely usable, the slope, the access, the water and where it comes from, the sheds, the fencing, any equestrian infrastructure, the outlook and orientation, the privacy, bushfire considerations, the age and condition of the home, vehicle access, zoning, which pocket of Bedfordale it sits in, and what else buyers can choose from that month.
A suburb median knows none of that.
Find out how much your Bedfordale home is worth, ask for an appraisal
Does more acreage mean more money?
No. Usable acreage matters more than acreage.
Someone buying for horses will often pay more for level, well-fenced land with reliable water and good access than for a larger block that is steep and heavily treed. Another buyer wants the opposite, and will pay a premium for bushland, privacy and elevation.
Which is why price per acre is close to meaningless here. The land has to be understood in terms of what a buyer can actually do with it.
Water changes the number
Some Bedfordale properties have scheme water. Others run on tanks, bores, dams, or some combination.
Two otherwise similar properties can therefore be offering buyers completely different propositions. A good bore or a dam that does not run dry is genuinely valuable to someone keeping animals or establishing gardens.
But you cannot just tick a box marked bore. Capacity and reliability are the whole question.
Fifteen acres near Churchman Brook
One Bedfordale sale has stayed with me because of how far apart the opinions were.
I was asked to appraise about fifteen acres for a long-time owner. She and her husband had built the home roughly forty-five years earlier and it was still largely original. Dated kitchen, dated bathrooms, presentation that matched the era. She knew all of that.
Another agent had told her to spend more than $60,000 on the kitchen and bathrooms before going to market.
I told her not to touch it.
My reasoning was simple. Replace the kitchen and bathrooms and the rest of a forty-five year old house is still forty-five years old. Then what? Flooring. Paint. Lighting. Window treatments. Sixty thousand becomes a lot more, with no guarantee any of it comes back.
More to the point, I did not think the house was what would sell the property.
The land was. Close to Churchman Brook Dam, looking straight down the valley, north facing. For fifteen acres in Bedfordale it was unusually level and usable. Excellent water, including a good bore and a soak-fed dam that held through summer. And a genuine relationship between the home and the land, where you could sit in the kitchen, look through the French doors and see all the way down to the dam.
Rural zoning gave it appeal to buyers wanting animals, subject to the usual planning requirements.
Those were the things to sell. Not a new kitchen.
The appraisals were $400,000 apart
The automated valuation could not produce a meaningful figure, because it could not find enough comparable sales to work from.
The opinions she had from agents ranged from about $580,000 to close to $1 million. Same property. A gap of roughly $400,000.
I did not think anything over $900,000 was realistic in that market. But I also thought that focusing on the age of the house would badly undervalue what was actually rare about the place.
We launched with Select Date Sale® from $800,000, and the marketing led with the land, the water, the outlook and the position rather than pretending the house was something it was not.
It did not sell in the first weekend. It took about five weeks before an offer came in that she was happy to accept.
It sold for $897,000.
What I liked most was what happened after. The sale gave her enough to move into a riverfront unit in town. No more fifteen acres to look after, and a walk along the river every afternoon, which was the part she talked about.
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Should you renovate before selling in Bedfordale?
Sometimes. Not automatically.
The question I ask is whether buyers will pay back more than you are about to spend.
Cleaning, gardens, maintenance and fixing obvious defects are usually worth doing and rarely cost much. Spending $60,000 or $100,000 because someone told you every house needs a new kitchen is a different proposition entirely.
Sometimes the buyer wants to renovate it themselves. Sometimes the value is in the land and the house is simply adequate. And sometimes a partial renovation makes everything you did not touch look worse by comparison.
It is a property by property decision.
Where online valuations struggle here
Automated valuations are not useless. In a suburb with hundreds of similar homes on similar blocks they have plenty to work with.
Bedfordale is not that suburb. An algorithm can read land size, bedrooms, bathrooms, sale history and nearby sales. It cannot tell you whether five acres are usable, whether the bore is any good, whether the workshop is worth anything, whether the access works for a truck and float, or how buyers react when they stand on the place.
Treat the estimate as information. It is not a strategy.
The better question
Start with the data. Look at recent sales and at what is competing for buyers right now. Then go past it and ask which of those sales are genuinely comparable, and what your property has that they did not.
After more than 1,500 personal sales since 2002, the properties that need the most judgement are always the unusual ones. Bedfordale has plenty. That is part of why people live here, and it is also why local knowledge matters when it comes time to sell.
Get the benefit of a local agent’s knowledge by requesting an appraisal now.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate are online property valuations in Bedfordale?
They are a starting point. Acreage, land usability, water, outlook and the sheer variety of Bedfordale property make automated comparison difficult, and in some cases the system cannot find enough comparable sales to produce a figure at all.
Does more acreage always mean higher value?
No. Usability, slope, access, water and buyer appeal usually matter more than the number of acres.
Should I renovate my Bedfordale home before selling?
Not automatically. The likely lift in price has to justify the cost, the time and the risk. Sometimes the land is the product and the house is not what buyers are paying for.
Do sheds and workshops add value?
They can, particularly when well built, accessible and relevant to the likely buyer. A shed that dominates the usable land can work against you.
Does a bore or dam increase value?
Reliable water is a genuine attraction on Bedfordale acreage, but it depends on capacity and reliability rather than simply having one.
How do I get an accurate Bedfordale appraisal?
Start with comparable sales, then assess what those sales cannot capture: land usability, water, outlook, improvements, position within the suburb and who is currently buying.
About the author: Brendan Leahy has been selling homes throughout the Perth Hills and Foothills since 2002, with more than 1,500 personal sales. Learn more about Brendan Leahy and the Naked Real Estate story
Truth. Strategy. Sold.