Houses

So we though we may have potentially found a house on the weekend. We looked at it briefly on Saturday and were interested enough to make an appointment to go and see it again on Sunday.

Since doing the looking at housing thing I've been reading up on 'first home buyers tips' all of which seem to mention to 'thinking with your head not your heart'. It certainly is a difficult thing to do when you're talking about buying a property that you hope to grow a family in. It doesn't get much more personal and emotional that that.

Many tipsters also talk about making a list of things you want and won't compramise on, which I have done in my head, and I know what Tony wants too. the idea being if you are getting emotionally attached, it allows you to logically stop yourself if it doesn't meet your needs.

So anyway we went along on Sunday with my parents as a second set of eyes. They both though the house was lovely, and very livable, Mum and I talked about what changes you could make to update the kitchen, Dad and Tony talked about how great it would be having a huge shed. Then the real estate agent points out that if Roe highway ever does end up going through, Forrest road (which is very close and you can already hear) would become part of the proposed Roe highway. So you'd have big noisy trucks and just generally a constant stream of traffic day and night. Despite the fact the current government has scrapped it, it doesn't mean it won't happen at some point, really it's inevitable. So after that little nugget of information we also found out the property was tenanted till November. The real estate lady seemed pretty sure the type of lease they had we couldn't kick them out till the lease expired. Their rent was pretty cheap too, so by the time you detract ours from thiers we'd only be ahead $60 a week.

So we thanked the woman, and drove back to our house for some lunch and further discussion. At this point I was still thinking, despite Roe highway, if the price was right (being a fair bit less than the asking price of $415,000) it would still be worth it for maybe 4 years of so, and that I really liked the house itself.

As I was preparing lunch, Mum was watching what I was doing and we were talking foodie stuff on and off, then she brought up a really good point. ' If you have to wait till November to move in anyway I wonder what kind of houses will come up between now and then?'. She had a really good point. I think part of my rush to snap up that house, and ignoring the logical reasons why it wouldn't be the ideal place to buy were because that was the first traditional Cooby cottage I'd seen on the market in about 2 months, and that's exactly what we want (but on a quiet street). I was thinking with my heart and ignoring logic.

So giving my brain time to slow down, putting emotion aside and being logical about the whole thing (after all one my non-compramises was to be a quiet street) we came to the decision that we could most likley find something better. The other thing too is that we haven't gotten our finance pre-approved yet. Hopefully we can sort that out very soon. I am told you have to fill out a bit of paperwork making an offer subject to finance. So it will be much easier and more attractive to sellers if we can make an offer with our finance ready to go. An offer with finance guaranteed, and no wait time for us to sell our existing home will no doubt be far more attractive than the average person. Also it occurs to me that a lot of people will be waiting for the reduction in Stamp duty in the new financial year before buying a home. Being new home owners buying under $500,000 we are exempt from stamp duty, so we don't have that restriction.

So it was a struggle, but heads won over hearts and we continue the search. Next week we meet the finance guy, so hopefully that is sorted soon too. I'm still hoping we can be in a house of our own before Christmas.