Now that we have a rough budget of what were working with we decide to start looking at other houses to see what the market is doing. We look at places below, within and slightly over our budget. Every house has at least 7-10 groups attend. So depressing that we haven't even had that many to date.
As expected the competition is fierce and offers are submitted and accepted within a week well above both the listed price and our budget. And its not even like these houses are anything special either. Sure some of them have been dressed nicely but some of these places would need another 50k of renovations just to get them up to date. This same routine happens time and time again. The quality of stock is poor and the prices high. We would also be required to pony up an additional 20k in stamp duty making these run down dumps less affordable.
We had a bright spark moment. There are plenty of volume house builders selling houses from $160k* and if we can get a block cheap enough we could probably get the same deal but with the 5-8 month inconvenience of having to temporarily rent. Theres a lot less in stamp duty as well as its only payable on the land and not the house. Our focus now changes more to building over buying established.
Its no secret our government and developers like to horde land for their own greedy gain, you have to snap up a block as soon as they become available and even then were looking at sub divided backyards at best. That doesn't worry us in the slightest. In fact it's our preference. Backyard blocks can be pretty polarising, you either love or hate them. Sure you don't get to show pony your house to the street but you get the privacy. For most of my working life I have either been living in a unit complex, a street fronted house on a busy thoroughfare or on a back block. No brainer for us. Bastard child back blocks come at a discount.
Time to start looking for land now.
*you wont get the display house for that much. Expect another 100k for that!
No comments:
Post a Comment