For most Dicky Beach families, the estate is not a spread of shares, cash and several properties. It is one house. Across the suburb, 65.3% of dwellings are separate houses and only 3.7% are flats, and 42.8% of homes are owned outright, mortgage-free, with roughly two in three owner households holding their place without a loan. These are properties families have held for a long time, close to a surf beach they have swum at for generations. Property-market data suggests a house here now sells well above a million dollars, with 2024-25 portal estimates in the order of $1.5-1.8 million — background figures only, never a valuation of your own home.
That combination creates a specific problem. Median household income in Dicky Beach was about $1,322 a week at the last Census, so most of the estate's value is locked in a single, hard-to-sell property rather than in cash. Nearly one in six dwellings sits unoccupied on Census night, a sign of how many are second or holiday homes families hold onto rather than let go. When the owners have passed on, the beach house is often the one thing the adult children all want — and the one thing that cannot be cut neatly in half.
A will's real job here is to give clear directions. Should the house stay in the family or be sold and the proceeds shared? If one child keeps it, how do the others receive a fair share — a larger slice of the cash and super, or a payment over time? Can the children own it together, with a right for one to live there? Catton Roderick Lawyers draft wills and estate plans that answer these questions on paper: directing a specific property, setting co-ownership or a right-to-occupy on terms everyone understands, and equalising provision so no child feels short-changed. Done well, that also lowers the risk of a family provision claim, where a child who feels left out asks the court to step in. Putting it in writing now is far kinder than leaving siblings to work it out later.
