Real estate in Longwarry

Tom Williamson Real Estate has been based in Drouin since 1933, about ten minutes up the highway from Longwarry, and we have treated the two as one working area for as long as anyone in the office can remember.

Longwarry is a small town on the Princes Way and the Gippsland railway line, with a population of around 2,400 at the 2021 census, sitting on the flat country at the western end of Baw Baw Shire before the land starts to rise toward Drouin. It has a primary school, a recreation reserve, a general store and a hotel, and it keeps the shape of a railway town because that is what it was built as. The line is still the thing that defines it: Longwarry has a station, and the Gippsland Line Upgrade works through Bunyip and Longwarry were carried out to lift the capacity and reliability of that service.

That station is most of the reason people buy here. Longwarry is one of the more affordable places in the shire with a train on it, and the buyers who find it are usually people who have worked out that a smaller town with a service beats a bigger town without one. Beyond the town itself the land is farming country — dairy and grazing on the flats, with Longwarry North running up toward the hills — so the properties on our books here range from houses on standard town blocks to small holdings of several acres.

What selling here actually involves. A smaller town sells differently, and the difference is not that it is harder — it is that there is less to compare against. In Drouin or Warragul, a dozen broadly similar homes will have sold within a few streets in the last year. In Longwarry, there may be two, and they may not be much like yours. That puts more weight on judgement and on knowing what a particular kind of property has actually done, and it is the part of an appraisal that a website calculator or a postcode average cannot do at all. It also means an appraisal here should be more explicit about its reasoning, not less, because you cannot check it against a crowd of recent sales.

The second difference is timing. Where only a handful of properties sell in a year, what is listed against you at the moment you come to market matters more than the state of the wider market. A good home listed when there is nothing comparable available can do considerably better than the same home listed alongside two others. That is worth planning around, and it is a conversation to have months ahead rather than the week you decide.

Why a Drouin agency. It is a fair question and you are entitled to ask it. Our honest answer is that buyer enquiry does not stop at a town boundary. Someone who rings about a Drouin listing is very often willing to look at Longwarry if the property suits them and the price does, and an agency working both towns is in a position to make that introduction. What we would not do is claim some special relationship with the town that you have no way of checking. We would rather show you the comparable sales we are relying on and let the reasoning speak.

If you own in Longwarry and want to know where you stand, we will come out, walk the property, and tell you — at no cost, with no obligation, and with the sales we are working from put in front of you rather than summarised.