A good price is about $1,560,000. I would walk past $1,700,000.

• 8B Palmerston Road, Waitara NSW 2077 goes to auction on 20 September and has been on the market four days, so this is the very start of the campaign and there is no pressure on the sellers yet.
• The first thing worth understanding is what this actually is, because it changes what you compare it to. It is one half of a duplex, but it sits on its own Torrens title with its own 413m2 block. That is a materially better way to own something than the strata townhouses and duplexes it will be lumped in with. There are no strata levies, nobody else has a say in the building, and the land is yours. I confirmed it two ways rather than taking the advertisement at its word - the title record reads Lot 102 DP871390 with no further titles issued, and Domain independently returns it as non-strata.
• Inside, it is genuinely updated. I went through the photos rather than trusting the copy. The kitchen is a real renovation, white cabinetry with a wall oven, a dishwasher and a stainless rangehood over a large format tiled floor. The living areas have polished timber floorboards and a split system, and open through sliding doors to a small paved courtyard behind a rendered wall. There are solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall 2 battery, which is roughly $12,000 to $15,000 of installed equipment that most buyers will not think to value.
• The outside has not been touched since it was built in 1996. Original salmon brick, a tiled roof, a diamond mesh security screen, an old antenna still on the roof and tired paving across the driveway. None of that is a problem, but it is not the picture the styling photos paint.
• The honest detractors: 103m2 of internal living is compact for three bedrooms, and you feel that in a floor plan this size. The outdoor space is a courtyard, not a yard. There is one garage plus room on the driveway, where most of what it competes against has two. It has a shared wall. And I could not sight the bathrooms - there is no bathroom photo in either set I could reach, so I have priced nothing for them in either direction. It is also currently tenanted, with a rental estimate of $1,015 a week, which is only a bit over 3% gross at this price. That is normal for the Upper North Shore but it is not an income buy.
• A three bedroom, two bathroom Torrens title duplex on its own 413m2 block, with ~103m2 of single level living, a single garage plus driveway parking, solar and a Tesla battery, two hundred metres from Waitara Public School and walking distance to both Waitara station and Westfield Hornsby.
• Adjusted back to this property for size, land, parking, title and the shared wall, those two land at $1,556,000 and $1,512,000, so the middle of the evidence is about $1,534,000. I have set the number a little above that, because the renovated kitchen, the solar and the battery are real money that is not counted in either comparison - I could not verify what condition those two were in inside, so I made no condition adjustment at all rather than invent one.
• Two things to know about the numbers being quoted at you. The figure sitting behind the listing is $1,500,000, and that is a price guide, not a target. On an auction campaign the guide is set low to draw a crowd, so treat it as the floor of the conversation rather than the ceiling. The automated estimates say $1.66m and $1.70m, and that is closer to where the sellers' hopes will sit. I have deliberately landed under both. Waitara house values are down about 10.7% over the past twelve months, both models are built on sales that have already happened, and both are anchored to a suburb median of $2.12M that is built on full houses on roughly 700m2 blocks. This is not that.
• It also helps you that there is almost nothing to compare it against. Waitara has not had a three bedroom duplex, semi or townhouse sell since September 2023, so there is no local run of results for an agent to point at.
• The ceiling is set by 25A Balmoral Street. It sold seventeen days ago for $1,860,000 and gives you an extra bedroom, 47m2 more house, a second car space and no shared wall. Stretching to $1,700,000 here would leave only $160,000 between the two, and that gap does not come close to covering the difference.
• A good price to pay is around the $1,560,000 mark, still fair up to $1,600,000. I would walk past $1,700,000.