Residential property in Sydney’s Upper North Shore is always appealing… even more so when the market slows.

Now could be an opportune time to trade up to a more expensive home.

A smart strategy would be to sell now and arrange alternate housing before buying your new home. This will give you time to get used to sitting in the driver’s seat. The market will favour buyers for a while yet.

If you sell then buy straight away, you’ll probably still be ahead of the game because your purchase should be discounted more than the loss on your sale.

For example, say your present house is valued at $860,000. To snag a sale in this slow market, you drop your price by 10 per cent. Buyers like a discount and your sale goes through at $774,000.

Effectively you “lose” $86,000. Perhaps you bought this home for $640,000, 10 years ago. In your hands, it has appreciated $134,000, less the costs of sale. (We’re ignoring monthly repayments because the likely alternative would have been rent payments.)

Your eyes are now on a $1.2 million house. It’s in the same distressed market, so you can probably buy at the same 10 per cent discount – $1,080,000 – saving you $120,000.

So you “lost” $86,000 on the sale of your home but “made” $120,000 on the purchase of your new home. You’re $34,000 in front.

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