Property Point

It is pretty easy is to identify when and where my vague dislike of heights turned into a full-on, socially embarrassing fear and hatred of heights; on the 40th floor of a Hong Kong skyscraper when a very powerful typhoon hit what was then the British colony in the 1990s.

The thing about skyscrapers is that they are designed to sway with the wind when they are hit by typhoons, hurricanes or cyclones.

While this is a life-saving engineering feature that I celebrate, the experience of lying face-down on the floor, swaying back and forth on the 40th level of building is not as much fun as it sounds.

You’re in Hong Kong so you try to remember those Chinese proverbs that are all about bending and adjusting rather than resisting and snapping: “The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.”  Crap like that doesn’t help.

Years later I surveyed the scene after a Mackay cyclone and noticed uprooted gum trees on one side of the street and a perfect row of unaffected palm trees on the other. While that was interesting, it didn’t change my fear of heights, which is now ingrained.

When I first started going out with my wife Sonia we had a trip to Cains and she arranged a trip on the skyrail up to Kuranda.

At that early point of our relationship I hadn’t broached the subject of my fear of heights and as we made our way up the mountain hanging in the air in a metal box attached to some piece of cable, I apparently transformed into a different person.

As I sat there frozen like a statue, not moving, talking or looking out, she thought there was something deeply wrong, perhaps with our relationship. She didn’t know that I was just a sook. She does now.

So do my kids, which is probably even worse.

When they were young I was with them at the Mackay Show and thought I could do the ferris wheel. I struggled through and tried, fairly unsuccessfully, to hide my phobia.

Some years later I tried it again on the one in Brisbane. That was a complete fail as the kids realised what was going on and went out of their way to make it worse by jumping around and trying to get me to stand up.

These days I don’t even try. From time to time I have to sell a unit in Mackay that is too high for my liking. I’m okay inside the unit but I won’t go out to the balcony and look over the hand rail.

“Step out to the balcony and have a look at the fantastic view,” I suggest to buyers as I plant myself in the lounge room.

I’ve sold a few and no one seems to have noticed that I never joined them on the balcony.

The problem with high-rise unit blocks is the insurance and the impact that has on the body corporate cost. It is a different story when it comes to those older unit blocks in our inner suburbs, mainly Mackay city, and East, West and South Mackay.

Those complexes don’t have anywhere near the insurance costs and body corporate fees are usually around the $3000 a year mark, which includes building insurance.

It’s a completely different market to the high-rise blocks but I feel those older, low-set units in the inner suburbs are great value, particularly for older people wanting to downsize and younger buyers wanting to break into the market.

You can still pick up a two-bedroom unit for under $300,000, which is pretty good in what is a hot real estate market.

And you usually get a courtyard … mercifully, on the ground floor.

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