Thanks Ozperp! It's nice to get some positive feedback on the blue, we have tried to make all the colours fairly neautral i.e. white kitchen, white ceasarstone benchtops, grey floor tiles, white walls etc. So we were a little surprised with the blue render, but I think it looks nice, although the wife is a bit nervous about it.
Plan_Trader - no costs blow outs which was good. We got a fixed price contract which ensured we could control all our costs fairly well. The cost to build was around 50K more than we had initially thought, but that wasn't the end of the world We got a bill for around 2K for soil removal which we weren't expecting. There wasn't any asbestos or anything buried on the site, which would have cost extra to remove. Apart from that, we upgraded from laminate to ceasarstone benchtops for the kitchen which cost an extra 3K or so which was well worth it, and also upgraded the stair railings so we have stainless steel instead of black wrought iron at a cost of about $700 I think. Other than that, no surprises.
There's not a huge amount of profit in it by the time you take out interest during construction (which is tax deductible if you're going to rent them - this is greta because it's ALL loss for 12 months or so, making the tax return very good), all the DA and CC fees etc, but we still get 2 brand new properties which will rent at a premium and with excellent depreciation, and all at around 15% less than market value. Whilst this is a small percentage, it's still 150K in cold hard cash, which is pretty good I reckon.