Reality can be quite transient. Today a neighbour could get an...

Reality can be quite transient. Today a neighbour could get an offer at $X for their investment property, tomorrow the same property can be given away at $X - Y.

As owner and investor in any asset, how do we somewhat guarantee that our asset could be sold off at X and not X-y?

1. Those potential buyers ought to have money. Lots of money so they can entertain the idea of buying something like what we have.
2. What we have is of value because it produces income adequate to meet the costs of capital. And to keep the initial capital invested safe.

On both of these measures, property at current prices are doomed. Most Australians are earning at practically the same inflation-adjusted wage they did 30 years ago. i.e. they're not getting any richer. Yet the same property being listed is asking for multiple times above that inflation adjusted price.

Beside a new coat of paint, some works done some year ago to fix that toilet, has the property have anything more valuable to offer its buyer than a home or an investment asset to rent out? Most of them do not. There are some with new shopping centre, maybe a rezoning that permit developers to make better use of the land... on the whole, nothing much has been done to the house or the neighbourhood or the infrastructure.

So to buy an asset hoping that one day someone else will fall over themselves to take it off of us... you'd need both plenty of rich idiots and a handful of incompetent (or corrupt) lenders.