There are some spectacular properties for sale locally at the moment. Twenty years ago I would have drifted off into a dreamy "how could we...?" daydream. Nowadays I think along the lines of "I don't have enough time for that. I want to finish this!"

But still , its interesting to see them. There are eight places for sale locally, all quite unique and mostly the uniqueness is appealing.

But local knowledge is important here.

One of the properties is a tiny pocket of flat land perched on the side of a very steep hill. Lowdown on the hill though, no scenic panoramas. Its about 10 metres from the Great Alpine Road, so you would need to have noise baffling to be able to sleep at night. The good news is the site is cleared, and the old run-down eyesore of a shack that used to be there is gone. (The previous owner had built a fence of lengths of corrugated iron, on which they had hand-painted a message for the world in dripping bright red paint: "Go Away!") But that shack is gone, because a few years ago we had a torrential storm and a floodwater came down a gully and, according to The Age, washed the house away.

The Age credits the State Emergency Service for this image

As you can see from the photo, the house wasn't completely washed away. I remember it the road was closed for a few days. The house sustained fatal damage but was still standing, but everything around the house...fences, garden, water tank...finished up downhill on the road. The house was demolished a few years later, but by then it was a shell with less than four walls! The land size is smaller than normally allowed for rural house building, and its hard to imagine a building permit being approved for such a potentially doomed location.
( We were affected by the same storm. Windfall)

Further up the road is the old berry farm. The previous owners built it up to massive multi-million dollar business and it was hub over summer selling cold treats like blackberry icecream, fresh smoothies and very cheap bags of frozen berries. In a couple of years the new owners have wiped the business out and it no longer functions.

"Well", you think, "I could tidy up the berry vines and start it up again". Well, no. The vines and all the trellising have been ripped out. With no maintenance done feral berry vines have taken over the cleared paddocks, so you get the lucky double of no cultivated berries but paddocks unusable as grazing.

Up until recently this disaster was being touted on the Commercial Real Estate website, but now its being sold as just real estate with no mention of its previous berry history. The icing on the cake, for me, is that along that stretch of road you have access to the Ovens River. Except this property....the paddock that abuts the river is owned by someone else. No river access for you!