Buy my house? PLEASE!

Hi all….

Shameless plug time I’m afraid.

Is anyone looking for something $625k+ range in outer south east Melbourne?

We’re selling up as we’ve bought some acreage. Unfortunatly, we’re on a tight time line with the acreage contract and we can’t afford to keep out house and purchase the new one.

We’re fast catching up to the finance clause deadline, so effectively we’re almost out of time and we’re about to miss out on our ‘dream’ property.

About ours:-

9 months old, no expense spared 2 storeys on the Chase Estate, Berwick. Upgraded EVERYTHING, including double glazing throughout.

Rental appraisal at minimum $500 a week, depreciation estimated at $15k in the first year.

Very low maintenance house and extremely well appointed.

Chase Estate properties showing decent CG over the last couple of years and with the proposed new ‘Century 21 Business Park and Clyde North precinct development on the cards, CG over the next few years looks very promising.

Quite aside from an investment point of view, it’s a fantastic home and one we’ll be sad to leave. If anyone happens to be looking for a new PPR at the moment around this area, then you’d be hard pressed to find better.

We never anticipated moving on sp quickly, hence why we went a bit overboard on the build of this one.

Anyway, we had 3 valuations by local RE’s. One pitched it at $680-$700k, one pitched it at $650-680 and the third pitched at $650+

At this stage, faced with the prospect of losing out on the new place, we’ll go straight to our bottom line if anyone is seriously interested.

So, could be a potential bargain here for someone.

Here’s the link to the current ad on RE.com

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-berwick-106560833?rsf=emailalert-propdetails

Apologies if you’re not allowed to advertise on here, hence why I put it in the coffee lounge. Mods – please delete this post of I have broken any rules.

Thanks for looking, and see you at the open inspection on Saturday?

T.
 
Probably belongs in the caveat emptor section, but that's cool. You're certainly not the first person to put a property ad on this forum. Good luck with the sale, looks like a beautiful home.

Just as an interesting aside; the block of land (approx 5,000sqm) at 105 Grices Rd there sold for $140k in 1997. It's now going for $1m-1.5m.
 
Good luck with it Propagate. I have no interest in your house, and know little about the values in Berwick, however must say that is a hefty depreciation figure for a 3 BR dwelling. I am assuming some higher level finishes and fixtures to get to that sum. Was the construction (turn key and finished) circa 450,000?

Have you actually had a QS do a depreciation schedule?

Again, good luck :)
 
Stunning property - 4 rooms would have been better, but clearly you were intending to keep and not sell - best of luck with the sale!
 
Get a price on the listing, quick!

Good luck, but I can't tell you how massively important it is to have a price listed. Leaving out a price guideline assists the REA in generating leads so that he can list yet more property, because it forces people to ring him and he's hoping that one of them will have a house to sell, BUT... it does you the seller absolutely no good at all.

I'm looking to buy now (Bris area not Mel, sorry) but there is just SO much listed and my time is so limited, that I just skip over houses with no price. Even if the house looks like it has good potential, I'll save the property, or note the details and the RE phone number, but I rarely get around to ringing.

You need to get your house off buyer's "save for later" file by putting a price up.
You don't have time to stuff around playing with potentially good buyers.
 
Agree with putting a price range on it. I was interested in a house once, was so close to not bothering with it because it had no price guide, but I ended up ringing up and was surprised that it was in my range (was expecting it to be higher) and ended up making an offer on it. Missed out on it, but not by much, so had it not been for another offer made slightly higher at the same time, I think my offer would have been accepted. So my point being, I was a potential buyer almost not going to investigate the price of it.
 
Player – Build cost was a gnats whisker off $350k. Carpet and window furnishings were another $20k on top, so $370 for final finished house – excluding external items, landscaping etc. The $15k figure was from a depreciator company, but as an estimate based on the build cost, not from a detailed report. I don’t know enough about depreciation to know whether it’s right, wrong or whatever – just going by what I was told by the depreciating company for a new house at a build cost of $370k, hope nobody assumes I’m trying to mislead, it’s certainly not the intention and thanks for highlighting.

Thanks for all the comments regarding 3 beds that was exactly our worry when we built the place. The problem with the 4th bedroom re-instated is the house becomes unbalanced. It’s so open plan, especially downstairs, that upstairs felt claustrophobic. We removed the 4th bed which becomes the large open upstairs sitting room where you can then sit and look out over the balconies.. As people have said, our comeuppance as been that we never intended to move so soon, so we specced everything up and built the house that we wanted to build. We could have built the same house for probably $40k less, with the 4th bedroom in and have it sold by now for similar asking price, but at the time we started planning all of this it was the intention that we were going to be there for 5 years+ so wanted exactly what we wanted and didn’t pay too much attention to what would be best for on-sell. I tell you what though, with the upgrades and with the time pressure on us, if someone does come along that’s interested; they’ll be getting a heck of a lot of house for very good money. We wired the upstairs sitting room, and laid out the windows so that the 4th bedroom can be easily re-made, it just needs two internal walls and a door.

Thanks for the comments regarding price. We originally had it listed with a price; the first two opens did well and got good feedback with one very interested party, (who finally decided last night that they’re not interested enough due to the proposed developments close by, by the 3rd open we got no-one through the doors. The RE suggested we made it ‘offers’ just to see if it would drum up more interest. It seemed to work, as we got a lot of people through last week, but nobody followed through with an offer. I’m not too keen on it showing no price either. We have about 2-3 weeks before its game over on the new place, so we’ll see how we go with the turn out this Saturday and if there are no leads I’ll instruct the agent to revise the ad and put a new price on it. We’ll just stick our bottom line on and see what happens.

Worst case scenario is that it doesn't sell in the next 3 weeks and we lose our next ‘dream’ house…..but having said that, we get to stay in this house, which until a few weeks ago was still our ‘dream’ house, but we’ll have a lot less mortgage to boot. As much as it will be disappointing not to be able move up to the place we’ve found, we’ll get over it and I’m sure we’ll find something else to do to keep us out of mischief, (probably something a bit easier on the pocket too).

We know we’d like to move as we love our house but have realized estate living is not for us any more. If the new place falls through, plan B is looking something like this:-

Take ours off the market
Look for a max $300k house that we would be ok living in ourselves and rent it out as a short term let
Put ours back on the market with the luxury of time so we can wait for a decent offer, and not have to fire sale
Sell ours and move into the $300k place, lightly renovate the $300k place whilst looking for the next ‘dream’ acreage
Move onto acreage whilst, (hopefully), being able to keep $300k place
Re-assess whether we can afford to keep $300k place on and rented out, or sell it and pay a bit more off the new acreage

The upshot of Plan B is that we would potentially be a lot better off financially and we wouldn’t have the time pressures, the downside of Plan B is that if it takes affect it means the new house we’re looking at now has fallen through, which would be pretty devastating as we’ll never find something like that one again, and not at the price we got it over the line at!

So, here’s to another day sat at work with my head spinning wondering which way our lives are going to head in the next few weeks.

Thanks again for the comments; I’ll keep the thread updated with how we get one.
 
Player – Build cost was a gnats whisker off $350k. Carpet and window furnishings were another $20k on top, so $370 for final finished house – excluding external items, landscaping etc. The $15k figure was from a depreciator company, but as an estimate based on the build cost, not from a detailed report. I don’t know enough about depreciation to know whether it’s right, wrong or whatever – just going by what I was told by the depreciating company for a new house at a build cost of $370k, hope nobody assumes I’m trying to mislead, it’s certainly not the intention and thanks for highlighting.

Sounds about right to me.

We wired the upstairs sitting room, and laid out the windows so that the 4th bedroom can be easily re-made, it just needs two internal walls and a door.

You would have told the agent this, but I wonder whether he has told every punter? And even if he has, lots of people have trouble getting their head around that stuff. If the 4 bed thing is important to prospective buyers, I would get a quote from a builder to add the walls and the door. Attach this quote and a plan showing the new wall positions to the marketing flyer. If this possibility helps you get someone keen, you might even get them keener by allowing the work to happen before settlement (assuming you've got a decent deposit from them and a contract with no 'subject to ...' clauses).

Scott
 
About ours:-

9 months old, no expense spared 2 storeys on the Chase Estate, Berwick. Upgraded EVERYTHING, including double glazing throughout.


Hi Propogate,

I'm going to be a bit blunt in this post, so please bear with me! I wish you the best, but here are my observaitons (and believe me I know the feeling of opens with no one coming thru!)

It's the bit above that worries me - in that it cries out "over capitalisation" on items not necessarily appreciated by all and sundry.

For instance if double glazing was mentioned, the question for many is "why do you need it? Is it in a very noisy place?"

The other is price and competition:

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-berwick-106572474

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-berwick-106486042

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-berwick-106577694

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-vic-berwick-106388354

You're in a tough spot.

Could be better to hold.

My other question - how long before your next "dream home" turns into the ex-dream home? It is often the thrill of the hunt that makes it the dream worth chasing - and once you get it.....

On the bright side, at least when someone says "Melbourne is booming - everything is selling before I can even make an offer!" - you can come right in and say "Well, have I got a deal for you!" :)

Cheers,

The Y-man
 
Just wondering any reason you don't have the floor plan in the ad?
personally i like to see the floor plan give me a bit more layout of the place.
As well able to see where things are and how accessible it is.
 
Y-man - You're dead right, we totally over capitalized. The problem is, we built for us and not someone else, we never expected to be selling so soon. In hindsight, we'd have omitted a lot of the upgrades. We realized when we built it that the value of what we were adding would not necessarily be reflected in on-sell.

The main reason we upgraded the windows was for both efficiency and the fact that the first house we rented here had windows so thin you could practically shatter them by sneezing. Coming from the UK where we have been used to double glazing, it was just something we personally wanted, again, realizing that it would not necessarily be reflected in the on sell price but may make the house more marketable in the face of competition.

It's looking like the market has cooled a little near us, which couldn't be worse timing. The problem is, we're not in a position to be able to give the place away.

I think I said in the first post that it was valued by several agents, top valuation was $680-$700, which we knew ourselves was crazy talk, just the agent trying to buy our business with false promises. Other agent valued around $650-$680 and the agent we're using said around $650k. Barry Plant's rule of thumb for the estate was take the current empty on-sell block price and add the build cost and you should be somewhere near. There's a block just behind us, bout the same size as ours, up for $265k, add on the $370 build, (which would be more like $420 now with the builders price increases), and you're around $635 with no drive or landscaping or buying costs.

The house is a Burbank Stoneleigh, one sold around the corner on Bridgewater Boulevard about 6 or 7 months ago for $625k on a smaller block with far less 'upgrades' and a regular sized garage. It sold for $624k if I remember rightly, so we have based all our figures on that as a worst case scenario, which means we can't go less than this as the bank will only led 80% on the new place (rural zoned, max LVR is 80% with them), so we're pretty stuffed as we're at 79.9% LVR if we get the $625k for ours, if we drop it further to sell it quicker we can't move on anyway so lose-lose situation. To be honest, I'd be loathed to sell it for less than the similar property not two minutes away sold for over 6 months ago. I think I'd rather stay here and have a look at what other options we have.

The place we are looking at is far from the dream house, as far as the house goes, but it's the land that's the dream bit. It's on 6 acres with a lake, woods and paddocks and potential for several side incomes. It's also in a superb spot. Places like it are few and far between where we are looking. I'm sure something else will eventually come up, and we'd be looking to get ourselves in a better position to move come then, but it will be disappointing none the less if this one doesn't come off.

It's just unfortunate this new place came up when it did as it caught us off-guard, we didn't think we'd be able to get into a position where we could potentially buy it so that's one of things that makes this all the more frustrating, we'd rather have had no chance on the new place than to get to a point where all we need to do is get a fair price for ours.

We tried to keep and rent ours, but we're just a little short on the LVR's to satisfy the banks to lend us enough for both properties.

Plan B is looking more and more likely by the day. Buy a cheapo, re-list ours in 6 months time, move into the cheap and have the luxury of time to look for the 'perfect' dream house.

huntresslove - no reason we didn't put thee floor plan in, I never thought of it to be honest. I might run some scans off today and fire them to the agent for him to add into the advert. He does have a set of plans that he hands copies out to at the opens, in case people want to see how the 4th bedroom can be re-instated.

Cheers.
 
depreciator - we did briefly consider adding the 4th bedroom back in, but decided against it as it truly would be detrimental to the feel of the house. We figured, (rightly or wrongly), that the kind of people looking at this style of house would be more like us and favor the open space and views from upstairs rather than a 4th bedroom. What it does do though, is put off the families than need the 4th bedroom. What we didn't want to do was re-instate it and then put more people off that would have liked it as-is, or end up staying ourselves and have a 4th bedroom that we really don't want.

Getting a builder in for a quote though, to leave with potential buyers, is a great idea and I'll look into that, although we may not have enough time left now to bother.

Any builders on here care to come round and give us a quote? Actually, it can probably be quoted remotely from the original plans.

Cheers.
 
To be honest, though, if I'm buying a brand new house, why would I want to buy one that needs an extension? Especially if there are new homes in the same area that have the 4th bedroom that I want?
 
You could probably do a rough estimate of the wall price by assuming $200 per sqm to put up the stud wall lined both sides. Allow maybe $20 per lineal metre for skirting. And maybe $600 to paint.
They're really rough figures, but useful for someone who might think, 'Wow, I can get an extra bedroom for bugger-all!' So they might think they're getting a bargain i.e. they're getting a 4 bedder for the price of a 3 bedder.
 
To be honest, though, if I'm buying a brand new house, why would I want to buy one that needs an extension? Especially if there are new homes in the same area that have the 4th bedroom that I want?

Yes, but would you buy a house just because it had 4 bedrooms? Our house is a little bit different from the norm, if it were me, faced with a 4 bed house that was so/so but had the required 4th bedroom or a house I loved but was a bedroom shy, but knew the bedroom could easily be added, I'd go for the house I loved and add the room. Just a personal opinion of course.
 
Yes, but would you buy a house just because it had 4 bedrooms? Our house is a little bit different from the norm, if it were me, faced with a 4 bed house that was so/so but had the required 4th bedroom or a house I loved but was a bedroom shy, but knew the bedroom could easily be added, I'd go for the house I loved and add the room. Just a personal opinion of course.

I can understand buying an older house and adding a bedroom. I can understand buying an older house, renovating and adding personal touches. But if I'm buying a new house, I expect something I can just move into and not have to do any work on it. No matter how easily a bedroom can be added, it would still be a lot of headache in my opinion, headache I wouldn't expect to have to go through if I'm buying a new house. Personal opinion only, of course.
 
It depends how it's pitched. A good agent would say to a couple without kids, for example: 'One of the best things about this house is that you've got this great spece up here, and down the track when you have kids it's a three day job and a few thousand dollars to add another bedroom! Instant increase in value. How good is that!'
 
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