House Things

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K. This weekend just gone, Cal and I decided to put a toe in the water of house-hunting. We’ve been saving up a deposit for a wee while, and although we love our apartment we’ve been talking in general terms about looking to buy.
We do some reviewing of the house listings (well, Cal’s been checking them regularly for a while and showing me the choice cuts) and find a few open homes to check out. We’re thinking suburbia, and our price range is telling us the same thing, so we decide on Sunday to check out a few spots in the Hutt Valley.
Spot one – open home is cancelled. (This was the one we were very keen on.) Spot three – smaller and less cool than expected. Spot two, however, was nicer than we were expecting. It ticked all our boxes. It needs work, but not crazy work, and it felt good. We spent about twenty minutes looking around it.
So we decided to make an offer.
And here we are, three days into househunting and we’re already heading into a meeting with the real estate agents for negotiations. We’re acting in good faith – we could live there, and three days of reflecting on it hasn’t changed that view. But we’re in no hurry. We’re not madly in love with the house, we won’t do anything to get it. We could let it go, spend another 6 months to a year in our apartment and be pretty comfortable with that. That’s something in our favour. (Also in our favour: my brother is a lawyer who does this sorta thing all the time. Cheers big bro for the advice so far.)
But despite this, I am a bit unnerved. It seems incredible and ridiculous to me that you can get this deep into real serious financial process based on twenty minutes of walking through an empty house. Man, I take longer than that to pick a library book. But this, apparently, is how it’s done.
So, internets – advise me. What do we need to know?
And what the heck are we getting ourselves into?
And does quoting Bill and Ted make me more or less qualified as a potential home-owner?

18 thoughts on “House Things”

  1. It’s probbaly different from Edi, but the ones I watched out for were: what are the costs associated with living there? What’s the typical upkeep (council bill, heating, water, lighting – the current tenant usually provides this)? Any oustanding works needing done that you’d be liable for (shared gardens, roof, parking area) where the work is earmarked and coming but not yet paid for.
    Oh, and, woo hoo! Good luck!

  2. Wow. A house! In the Hutt.
    The Hutt.
    I think as long as Ghengis Khan isn’t you’re next door neighbor, and is alway eating twinkies, you’ll be ok- He enjoys the excellent sugar rush.

  3. In case nobody’s said this already:
    Get a LIM! If you’re being pressed for time you can do one yourself with the right docs.
    Get a building inspection, preferably by an independent and not someone offered up by the RA. We had the latter and he was fine but missed stuff we spotted further down the track…
    And good luck!

  4. That sounds very similar to how Luke and I got our house, but ours was option 3 🙂 Saw an ad in the paper, had a look on saturday, brought the parents up to the open home on sunday, made an offer on monday and moved in 5 weeks later 🙂
    Jet Simian has some good advice. Also trust your instincts; if something feels wrong, it probably is.
    Enjoy

  6. Get a building inspection done by someone qualified before you sign anything. Can’t stress this enough, and don’t be afraid to use any faults the inspection finds as a lever to reduce the price.
    Also remember agents aren’t working for you, they are working for the vendor and the vendors interests, not matter how much they try and convince you otherwise.

  7. I don’t have any advice that other people haven’t already offered, so I’ll just say this – buying a house is hella weird.
    Personally, I enjoyed the shopping portion, but got major cold feet over the commitment of actually buying a house. I mean, once you own it, you have to look after it. And you can’t just give notice and move out when you feel like it. The garden is actually, really, your problem. I wasn’t ready to commit to a house, and I got one anyway. It’s left us with a troubled relationship (the house and I, that is).
    So, er, be sure about the house. No, they’re not permanent, but breaking up with them is complicated, and it’s a major thing you’re getting in to. ^^;

  8. I am not a property expert, but things I picked up on the way to home ownership:
    1/ LIMs are only useful to a certain point. They cost a lot, take a while to collate and are only really useful for older houses. Our solicitor advised against getting one for our house since it was so recent (1960s).
    2/ House inspection is a must. Some inspectors are better than others but we successfully avoided buying a couple of lemons on the strength of expensive reports.
    3/ You aren’t necessarily buying a house for the rest of your life — just “long enough” (whatever that might mean to you).
    4/ Check with the council what documents they have on record for the house — this includes consent applications and so forth.
    5/ Get an aerial photograph outlining mains / waste water lines and boundaries (if possible). Get them to email this to you since then you can file it away for ever but find it easily (as opposed to pieces of paper).

  9. “Also remember agents aren’t working for you”
    Worth repeating. In fact, *nobody* is working for you. The buyers are at a disadvantage for the entire process.
    That said, your lack of commitment (in a good way) will work in your favour. It’s an amount of leverage you never have if you have to sell your house at the same time.

  10. The Hutt? All the cool kids are living in the northern suburbs, dude. J’ville and Newlands both have excellent public transport into town, plus good amenities. And are relatively affordable. Heck, if you’re interested, I can tell you about a couple of good properties on the market in Newlands at the moment.
    Working by negotiation is good; it means you can do stuff like talking the price down from stuff turned up by the building report. DO NOT attempt to economise by skipping a building report; it’s a chance to get a professional opinion on the place.
    Financials: I’m assuming you have a preapproval for your mortgage, since you’re making offers. Remember that this just means that you CAN get finance from the lender who’s preapproved you – you don’t have to. So you can make the offer, secure that your preapproval means that you can buy the place in the end – and then go off, talk to a mortgage broker, and see if they can set you up a better deal than you’ve already got. Mortgage brokers work with no obligation – you don’t pay them, the lender pays them for bringing them your custom. I’d definitely recommend talking to a broker once you’ve got a confirmed offer (and thus you know the actual details of the final transaction). We used a broker on our last two house purchases – in both cases, she got us a good deal on the rates, told us about a package that the lender offered that we hadn’t known about (discounted lending rates for anyone working in the civil service, which you guys can probably get), plus a cash contribution to our legal fees. Even in our recent house purchase, where we stayed with the same lender, going to a broker rather than just walking in and talking to our bank manager (which I’d done for the lending preapproval) got us ahead – the broker got us the same rates as the bank manager was going to offer, but she got them to kick $400 in for lawyers. Really recommend it.
    The mortgage broker we used was Vickie Pickering, at The Conveyancing Company – http://www.toconvey.co.nz/people.htm#vickiepickering. we’ve used her twice and probably will again in future. Mention our names if you talk to her. It won’t have any effect, but it’s nice to feel like there’s a personal connection.
    I’m serious about the northern suburbs, man. Come to the ‘hood.

  11. Echo Evie’s comment above about the whole “you can’t just move out” bit. Check out the neighbours. The first house we bought (back in the UK), if we’d been renting, we’d have moved out about six months after moving in, due to a neighbour-from-hell situation (I may have told several amusing-in-retrospect stories from this period). Owning the place meant we had to tough it out, which was extremely stressful for about a year.
    So, yeah. Check out the neighbours.
    Also: are you moving because you don’t like the flat any more, or because you want to own your own place? If the latter, have you considered just making an offer on the place you’re currently in? It’s at least worth checking whether the landlord would be interested in selling. I’m seeing a lot of investment properties starting to come on the market at the moment, as people are starting to get worried about the government possibly changing some of the tax dodges around rental property (LAQCs, etc) – so your landlord might be amenable to a handy lump sum. Plus, you don’t have to move, which is quite a big plus.

  13. Thanks for all the comments and advice! All are being carefully noted. We’re on top of a lot of these things but there’s several bits I haven’t heard before.
    Yeah, the Hutt. We were planning on looking in other suburbs too, e.g. Jville, but the Hutt came up first – and it is my ancestral home, seat of my family castle, etc., so I know how to negotiate it smoothly. If this doesn’t happen, other places are still in the mix.
    Jenni: pleased to hear that about Bill and Ted. *phew*

  14. Good luck. As Sam said, we saved up for over a year, entered the housing market for 2 days before making an offer, waited 7 days for it to go unconditional and moved in 4 weeks later. The proportion of time on each part of the process doesn’t represent the importance of the part 🙂
    With any luck you will love the place you buy like me and Sam do ours.

  17. All good advice there. I’d echo the “nobody’s working for you” one. Even later down the track when selling and you hire an agent, they just want to get a sale and are actually working for their own selves. But that’s further down the track.
    It still amazes me that you wouldn’t think of buying a car without taking it for a test drive, but no one will let you live for a weekend in the house you want to spend megabucks on.
    All exciting stuff!

  18. First off, good luck to you both!
    My advice repeats a lot of the above points (get a good conveyancer you like and trust, building inspections HELLS YES, trusting the agent HELLS NO) and also adds – enjoy the process. Seriously. It’s a big, fun thing to do, with a possible great result. Don’t let the horror stories bring down your experience of it. A lot of people will be eager to tell you it is a HUGE COMMITMENT and RATES MUST RISE and the MARKET WILL CRASH and also BEARS EAT HOME-OWNERS and all that. They are justifying their own decision. Nod politely, listen to the more lucid bits and ignore sour grapes, especially if it’s coming from someone who doesn’t own a place.
    It is never the wrong time to buy the right place at the right place. You, and you alone, will know if that’s the case. Crunch the numbers, allow a lot of extra time and some extra cash. Plan for the worst and hopefully you’ll be enjoying the best.
    (Also, it bears repeating, remember the agents will lie and are really NOT on your side, so feel free to take out your horror day on them. A great bargaining tip is repeat every offer four times, most people will give up after three and drop their price, if it really doesn’t shift then they may be serious.)
    Have fun!

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