House buying

Well instead of renting we are buying! Unfortunately arriving at this time of year was possibly not the best move. Stacks of people come up from Victoria and NSW and rent out houses for at least a month over christmas, thus we can find nothing to rent that we would be prepared to sit in let alone eat or sleep.

Buying is very straightforward. You see a house you like, want etc and tell the real estate agent how much you will pay. At this point you should sign a contract to agree this price. They then go to the seller with the price, they either agree or disagree, if they come back agreeing, the house is yours. If they say no, you go back and forward till you get to a price you both agree on.

You then pay an immediate 10% deposit - agggghhhhhh! You pay this to the real estate agent. You then arrange for a termite inspection and and buildings inspection and if that shows everything ok, your solicitor arranges settlement day. If anything comes to light, you can get this put into the contract that it needs sorting before settlement. The solicitor starts sorting out their equivalent of searches etc. The settlement (completion) date is then agreed. You then pay the final amount to your solicitor together with their fees, any stamp duty etc. This needs to be in the account on the Settlement Day.

We looked at a few small houses that we were planning on buying, living in, doing up then renting out before finding some land and building our own place. Everything we looked at wasn't quite right. By this time, realising how easy buying was, we decided to hell with it, let's just buy something big enough that we like.

So upped our budget and trawled around the agents again. Looked at about five or six that all got better and better! During one of our drives, one of my fillings came out so then we had to find a dentist. Got an appointment but also got an appointment to see a house about half an hour before. Kevan fell in love with this house and land. I liked it, didn't love it but could see we could do stuff to it and loved the land. We said yes! Obviously then we should have gone straight to real estate office to sign contract but I had my dentist appointment in five minutes and we were about 10 minutes away. Anyway, he said come to the office as soon as you can, so dentist filled the tooth, a spot of lunch and off we went to buy a house!

By 5pm on the 9th December we had bought a house.