Essendon

Let's keep on jogging.

so the other day I went to the Essendon Theatre Company which is one of my favourite places to go for theatre or at all maybe not just because as established many times on this podcast you get to see their shows from dining room tables and But also because the programming at that place is so peculiar and brave and unpredictable and unexpected, especially in the community theatre sector.

And yeah, the beautiful community there is so evidently full of like courageous, odd artists.

And it's great.

And Essendon is very lucky to have them.

But yeah, I was there this time specifically to see their production of Top Girls, which is directed by Darby Turnbull.

And yeah, so it's a play written by Carol Churchill, which you likely know it's one of her, you know, heavier hitters in terms of people knowing of her body of work.

But this is the best that I've seen that scene go.

Melbourne had made it through to the grand final, and the plan was to go have breakfast with him on the Sunday morning.

And I've rocked up to the backstreets of Essendon somewhere, and 8:30, I don't know what time it was, and we're looking at the menu.

I said, "Mate, what do you want?" I'm thinking of maybe the eggs Benny or something like that.

He's looked at the waitress and said, "I'll have the calamari and chips." [laughs]

Yeah, a few weeks or something.

Yeah, a few weeks in, and you guys were bringing all these dudes from Essendon-

[laughs]

... and I was bringing all these dudes from the southeast.

Mm

... uh, Bacchus Marsh, Melton, um, you know, Essendon.

There, there's a whole bunch of them.

Um-

In 2000.

And in fact, there's, I was just, uh, listening today, there's, uh, certainly DC-3s that are still flying around.

There's one out of, uh, Essendon called the Melbourne Gooney Bird.

Uh, and some 35, 36 years ago I was working on that aircraft when it was being refurbished.

And, uh, I spent plenty of time with Ansett in, uh, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, as I said.

Uh, special days when we saw the, the last flight of the F-28 and, uh, open days and things at Essendon and Tullamarine and, um, yeah, and I still got that great photo of myself and Dad sitting in the cockpit of the A320 on the second last day of operations at Perth, uh, just before it was all wound up.

And yeah, 25 years have been passed.

It was such a key point in my, my career and my childhood and memories and, and funnily enough, just, just being in Perth the other week, um, walking through the Qantas terminal, which is of course the old Ansett terminal.

Well, effectively it is VH registered.

She's now, uh, changed from the Alpha Whiskey Papa New Zealand call sign to X-ray 73.

But, uh, the photo I posted was another well-known DC-3 located out of Essendon in Melbourne called Oscar Victor Mike, uh, better known as Melbourne's Gooney Bird.

And, uh, yeah, so the news is that Gooney Bird Adventures here in Darwin has originally purchased Shortstop Jet Charter in Melbourne, which brought in a second DC-3 into the fold.

And so that then becomes problematic and then it's very expensive to dip your own cash into these sort of plays.

If you have a strata title block, let's just say you've got eight units in the block what you can do from a finance point of view if you do have the deposit and obviously you do have the serviceability is split up the payments so you might be able to do two or three units with the lender one two or three units with lender two and then the rest with lender three so it's much easier to get financed at an 80 rate meaning you less need of your own money to sort of put into the deal so that's one of the big positives to buying a strata title block already the other sort of slight con is there are much less around you know it's much harder to find one especially if it stacks up so that's another thing to consider and in January the yields are a little bit lower so what I want to do is just give you a real-time example of one that we've been looking at recently as of recording so we are 21st of August this obviously get released a little bit later but if you go and have a look at this one this is in Essendon it's 62 McPherson Street it's of five two-bedders in this particular block of units on 725 square meters of land.

So the interesting thing here is most of the unit blocks as I go through them, so you can see I'm winging this a little bit, are renovated quite nicely.

So I reckon this one, it's not sold at the moment, but I think it'll sell for around that 3 million mark.

Now for ourselves, what we've been buying for clients is we call it a scrambled unit approach.

And so what that means is if someone does have borrowing capacity to do five units, we buy individual units in different blocks across different suburbs, across different cities.

And so if we look at the breakup value for this Essendon property, for example, we're looking at a price of around 600,000.

Now we've been buying units in Essendon around that sort of 450 to sort of 490 mark.