What’s this book about?

Real Estate Escapes is a collection of timeless property parables where not all agents, solicitors and conveyancers are created equal, and where not all escapes are successful. Drawing from over four decades experience, Tim O’Dwyer combines his deep knowledge of the subject with an uncanny ability to explain it in a simple and entertaining way these true tales of getting out of contracts, leases, prosecutions and legal liability.

Noel Whittaker, AM, explains further.

Foreword

Australians have long had a love affair with property. And who can blame them — bricks and mortar have had a good record of capital growth in this country. Unfortunately, the popularity of property has also attracted one of our nation’s worst predators — property spruikers.

Many of them are based at the Gold Coast and regularly make more than 50,000 cold calls a week to flog overpriced properties to a vulnerable and an uneducated public. Despite continued warnings from many reputable sources to take independent advice before signing a contract, most of the victims fall for the spruiker’s spiel and soon enter into a binding contract with their conveyancing being handled by a solicitor recommended by the spruiker.

It is only when second thoughts arise or things go terribly wrong, as they often do, that these buyers look around for a second opinion.

Enter lawyer Tim O’Dwyer who I first encountered decades earlier when he was a mild-mannered suburban solicitor. Tim now found himself not only helping people get out of overpriced contracts but also exposing the crooks and their conveyancing accomplices. In the process he damned limp-wristed regulators and lame-duck legislators. As a result he was once sued (unsuccessfully) for defamation by a spruiker, reported to his Law Society by a Fair Trading Commissioner and vilified in Parliament by a Fair Trading Minister. None of the malicious mud stuck.

Tim was right in the frontline from the start of the battle against the spruikers — along with the likes of Neil Jenman and Margaret Lomas and myself.

More than sixteen years ago, when Tim was coming to national prominence as a capable “contract killer” and fearless consumer advocate, a friend began hassling him to write a book. Tim would say he was too busy in his legal practice, and anyway, was already writing regularly for newspapers, magazines, The Australian Real Estate Blog and Australian Property Investor magazine.

Thankfully a book, this work, has finally emerged. It is chock-full of interesting and informative anecdotes. Tim O’Dwyer is not just a great solicitor — he has a gift for simplifying apparently complex topics so they can be understood by ordinary folk.

While he facilitated hundreds of real estate escapes and rescues for buyers and sellers alike in his long legal career, Tim has modestly recounted only a few of his own among the stories here. The rest are about real consumers, real agents, real solicitors, real property professionals (with few real names) as well as about many of the court cases which followed real estate escape attempts in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and even one from the United States.

Consumers, agents, solicitors, conveyancers, developers, valuers, lenders, brokers and regulators particularly should read these stories carefully, and learn from them. This will be an invaluable resource for everybody involved in real estate.

The world of real estate can be a dangerous place, but it will become much safer thanks to Tim O’Dwyer’s collection of modern day morality tales which I commend to you the reader without reservation.
Noel Whittaker AM

Financial Services Commentator and author