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Published: December 2nd 2007
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01 - Plan view of the estate
Plan view of the estate. We are in the corner, next door to the orchard. Well, we've gone and bought a small piece of Australia!
We are locked into our rental for 12 months, they are really strict here with tenancy laws - so unless we find someone to take over our lease, we are committed to staying here for the duration of the tenancy.
Whilst we are happy to rent at the moment, we wanted to get a foot on the Ozzie ladder as soon as possible, as land and house prices are going crazy here at the moment. Some areas rose 40% in the last 12 months! and there is no sign of a slowdown.
We can’t get a mortgage until Emma is working, so we thought we'd look at some land as it is obviously cheaper than land and a house.
We thought we could put our deposit on the land and it would reduce the payments down enough so we could afford them now.
We started looking and found an area called Berwick, which we looked at back in January and really liked. There is not much land there left for release so we went down to have a look. We saw a beaut and enquired about
02 - Close up of our bock
Our piece of Australia. The house that is there at the moment will be demolished. The land will be flat and ready to build on by the time it is titled. it.
It turns out that this particular release is not titled until next September. That means you can’t start building on it until then. The beauty of that is, you don’t have to pay for it until then either! We only had to put down $1000 deposit to take it off the market, then we pay 10% 2 weeks later as a deposit, then we don’t have to pay for the rest for almost a year. It's a timescale that suits us as we won’t be ready to build until then anyway. So it means we get to buy a piece of land in a years time at todays prices in effect.
Paying the $1000 gave us 3 days grace to 'cool-off', but as of last Wednesday our contract went 'unconditional', so the land is now ours and neither us or the developer can pull out.
It looks great at the moment as the main road is a dirt track and the surrounding area is just fields. The road will be tarmaced, street lights will go in and they will plant palm trees up the grass verge. Our block has an old house on it, which
03 - 'The Orchards' release
The blocks surrounding ours. we be demolished. By the time it is titled we will have a nice flat plot, ready to build on.
Opposite us are fields of horses, but we have been told that this will all be developed in the future. Next door to us is an orchard, but again - that may be bought and built on at some point down the line. What we have basically bought is a piece of land on a nice estate. Not exactly what we came here for, but it will get us a step up for the next one and give us good experience of the house building process.
Building your own house here is pretty much the norm. A company will buy a block of land and create an estate. In this case, AV Jennings is the company that own the whole development. They are also a house builder. They will keep some blocks to build their own houses on to sell as 'home & land packages' and the rest will be sold to other builders to build packages, or privately. You go to the land sales office, pick out your block then go to the display village where there
maybe 40+ display house from various builders and decide which house you want to build. There are so many builders and house permutations to build it' unreal. You can then chop and change the plans round a bit as well. You can go to a bespoke builder and have a one-off custom house, but it would be much more expensive.
This is the 'estate' that AV Jennings has built, it's called 'The Chase' and our block is 1338, Grices Road on the Orchards release.
Click Here for 'The Chase' It is more established now, the block we have bought is one of the last releases. The area is lovely and the old village is a stones throw away, with nice shops and restaurants. It will be about a 30 minute drive to work for me and an hour to the city. It is also handy for the quieter beaches and to get down the Peninsula.
We have seen about 50 display homes over the last few weeks from various different builders, but the one we have finally decided on is the Windsor 47 by Porter Davis. It has a double garage ( which we can extend to almost a triple
05 - Bottom of our road
This is the main road up the outside of the estate, Grices Road. This will be tarmaced by the time we are titled. Our block is at the top of the hill, on the left. ), a lounge, study, huge kitchen/diner/family room, laundry, cinema room and 'al-fresco' area downstairs then upstairs there are 3 guest rooms, ( all en-suite ), an upstairs lounge with balcony and a HUGE main bedroom with a sitting area, an e-suite and outdoor area. The plans show the standard main bedroom layout, but the bedroom we like is on display in one of their show homes as an option. It had long folding doors along the side that opened out into an undercover outdoor area, with seating and a fire place. It was pretty class. The house has a total floor area of 4700 sq feet!
Our block is a fair size, so we'd still have a decent back garden. Big enough to install a swimming pool - unfortunately, the garden may be big enough, but our budget isn’t. So that's probably something for the future.
This is the builder we are going to use:-
Click Here for Porter Davis Anyway, that's the exciting news over. Stay tuned for some beach pictures that we took this weekend when we went exploring the Peninsula. I'll upload them over the next few days.......
Tara.
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