‘I’d given up hope’: Brooke shares the raw reality of buying a home in a $1m market

Brooke Rolfe clasps a hand over her mouth, the shock of the words she’s just heard rendering her mute. 

It’s mid-evening, and the Western Australian journalist and PR professional is on the phone. It’s a call she’s been waiting to have for the past two years.

“Oh my God,” she exclaims. 

“This is literally the happiest moment of my entire life.”

The millennial has been scouting for property to buy across parts of Western Australia since moving back home from Sydney at the start of 2024.

She’d been to countless inspections and turned her search into a part-time gig, documenting the reality of real estate in her budget to her scores of followers.

One of the last properties she considered was an asbestos shack. It was within her price range of about $500,000, though Rolfe had doubts.

She has been entirely open about her budget, and even made multiple offers on properties during her house hunting. None have been successful – until now.

“The sale price was $615,000, which was a lot more to be honest than I expected to pay because the listing price was going from $499,000,” she said in a recent YouTube video.

“I think I originally offered $570,000 and then I took a few phone calls and I called my mum and my dad and I said ‘I need more money’.”

Rolfe notes there was a lot of back and forth before her offer was finally accepted.

“It makes me so emotional because I just know everything that’s gone into it and I’m just so grateful. I’d actually given up complete hope,” she said.

“I was going to inspections up to three times every week… I was seeing it all.”

She described seeing the trashed houses, the disgusting, stinky houses and properties that were just so far beyond livable “you just didn’t know where to start”.

She said there were also houses that smelled so putrid it seemed like someone had died there, and a separate house where a rodent was squished into the carpet.

The property she ended up securing cost her a total of $615,000. She used the federal government’s 5 per cent deposit scheme to seal the deal.

“The purchase price was $615,000. My deposit was $30,750. My loan was $584,250,” she said, offering a breakdown of the cost.

“In total, I contributed about $51,000 – that was money that left my account. Of that the deposit itself was $30,750 and there was $20,219.25 that was used for things like stamp duty, conveyancing, registration fees, council fees and settlement costs.”

She added prices went up “dramatically” during her two-year search. 

“It’s you versus 50 other people who have way more money than I do and it’s like ‘I can’t compete with that’. There’s investors, there’s flippers,” she said.

“There’s a lot of people who have financial backing that I will never have access to.”

Rolfe is now focusing on what she can afford to spend to renovate her new home.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the property market in the west has followed the trajectory of Australia’s other major cities with a surge in home prices.

As of March 2026, Perth’s median house price is $1.179 million.

This is up from December 2025 when it was $1,087,762. This figure is a jump even from June 2025, when the median house price for Perth was $954,686.