A home in Strathfield in Sydney's inner west sold for nearly $500,000 above its reserve on the weekend. The five-bedroom house at 201  Homebush Road attracted 19 registered bidders and a crowd of more than 160 people on the day. The hammer fell at $2.39 million, $490,000 above the reserve.

Actress Jennifer Lopez has has been very busy off-camera making some recent luxury real-estate news. Lopez most recently listed a whopping 17,129-square-foot mansion in Los Angeles for $17 million. In October, she bought a 6,500-square-foot, two-story penthouse at the boutique Whitman condominium in Manhattan's NoMad district for just north of $20 million. In 2013, she bought a home in the Hamptons for roughly $10 million.

New building figures show homeowners have become snared in a granny flat building frenzy that has flooded local councils with applications to construct secondary dwellings on their properties. NSW Department of Planning and Environment data indicated that 4818 new granny flats were built last year, nearly double the 2867 built the previous year and three times more than the 1511 built in 2010.