WHAT APARTMENT BUYERS REALLY WANT IN THE INNER WEST
And Why Most Listings Don’t Deliver It
Scroll through enough Inner West apartment listings and they start to blur: “light-filled”, “modern kitchen”, “close to cafés, shops and transport”. None of that tells you why one building will always outsell another, or why two almost identical units in competing blocks can perform completely differently.
When you listen to buyers instead of brochures, the pattern is clearer. They’re not searching for adjectives. They’re searching for safety – not physical safety (that’s assumed), but safety from mistakes: the wrong building, the wrong aspect, the wrong strata, the wrong noise they didn’t hear at the open because twenty people were talking over it.
The first filter is light. Serious Inner West buyers know that “north-facing” isn’t a magic spell, but they also know what it feels like to walk into a dim, cold unit at 2pm in winter and realise the sun never really arrives. They read floor plans, check where the living spaces sit relative to balconies, and pay attention to what the building faces – a lane, a courtyard, a main road, or another wall three metres away. Good light forgives a lot. Bad light exposes everything.
The second filter is sound. The Inner West is busy, layered, restless. Train lines, light rail, buses, arterial roads, pubs, flight paths. Buyers are getting more forensic. They will literally stop speaking in the living room during an open and just listen. They’ll stand on the balcony and wait. They’re clocking: plane frequency, train rumble, bar spill, neighbour noise. Buildings that were thrown up without serious acoustic thinking are being quietly punished; those with better glazing, sensible setbacks and decent internal walls are being rewarded.
Then there’s strata. Not the token one-page summary – the real thing. Minutes that show whether the building behaves like a functional organism or a family argument. Are there repeated leaks? Render issues? Disputes about short-term letting? Are there major works looming? Buyers are starting to understand that they aren’t just buying a box; they’re buying into a collective. A low levy figure means nothing without context. A higher levy in a building with a healthy sinking fund, regular maintenance and no lurking defects can be a better bet than a cheap building that’s starving itself.
Layout is another quiet differentiator. The old stock of 60s–80s walk-ups has an advantage here: bigger rooms, sensible separation between living and sleeping, proper laundries. A lot of newer stock traded that for visual tricks – long corridors, “study nooks” that are really just widened hallways, bedrooms with internal windows. Buyers, especially post-COVID, have stopped falling for that. They want doors that close, corners where you can work unseen, and space to live without constantly negotiating around furniture.
Location still matters, but not in the lazy way agents talk about it. “Close to transport” is only useful if that transport takes you somewhere you need to go. For a nurse at RPA, Camperdown beats most of the eastern suburbs. For a uni academic, Newtown, Ultimo, Glebe, Forest Lodge and Camperdown come with built-in value through time saved, not just cafés per square metre.
Finally, buyers want honesty about the building’s story. Has it had issues? Were they fixed properly? Is the builder still solvent? You can feel the shift in conversations at opens – people bring up Opal Tower, Mascot, structural failures they’ve read about. They’re not being dramatic. They’re trying to protect themselves.
What apartment buyers really want in the Inner West isn’t perfection. It’s alignment: a building whose reality matches the life they’re actually going to live in it. Light, sound, strata, layout, location, history. If you ignore those, you’re selling a brochure. If you lean into them, you’re selling a home.
— From the desk of
Ramon Raneal