Why we ask about the washing line first

Erin Maddocks sold her first house in 2010, on the peninsula, to a family who had been dragged through six identical Saturday opens by an agent who never once asked what they actually needed. She remembers standing in the kitchen while the mother worked out, out loud, that none of the six had a spot for a washing line that got sun. Erin got that one right by accident. She spent the next four years making sure it stopped being an accident.

Anchorage opened in 2014 above a shopfront on the peninsula, four years after that first sale, because Erin wanted a small agency that did the two things properly rather than a big one that did five things at half speed: sell houses honestly, and manage rentals the way an owner would manage them themselves if they had the time. The name is not clever. An anchorage is a place a boat can actually sit still in, out of the current, and that is what buying or renting a home on this peninsula is supposed to feel like after the search.

The turning point was a Saturday in 2018, an open home in Clontarf with forty people through the door in ninety minutes and a young family swept along in the middle of it, overwhelmed, saying nothing to anyone. Erin pulled them aside afterward, sat them down with nothing but a cup of tea, and asked what actually mattered: school run, the dog, somewhere for tools, a yard that got afternoon sun. They bought a different house three streets away six weeks later, one that had been sitting quietly on the list the whole time because it photographed badly. That conversation is now the first thing every buyer at Anchorage gets, whether they ask for it or not.

Today there are four of us. Erin and Dale handle sales, Ngozi runs the property management side, and Tamsin keeps the contracts, settlements and trust account honest, which on a peninsula with this much water frontage is a bigger job than it sounds. We have sold a bit over four hundred homes since 2014 and we manage a growing rental portfolio across Redcliffe and the bay suburbs around it. We are not the biggest agency on the peninsula and we do not want to be. We would rather sit with you in an empty room and ask what you actually need than run you through a sixth open home you were never going to buy.