To be honest, for a number of years we questioned the value of getting into the market at all. Europe has survived for centuries on renters, with people spending their whole lives in one rental property. Renting in Europe is a different game as long term tenants are allowed to improve the property that they live in and make whatever changes they want to make, so long as they add value. Sadly this is not the case in Australia, with landrats creating a nasty environment for renters, pushing them into the mortgage market.
I've lived in 4 locations since moving out of home and really none of them were ideal landlords. The first house I live in was the lovingly termed "minimum security prison" - a bedsitter in Preston, near the library. The main room/bedroom was 12 feet by 10 feet. Pace that out. Imagine living in that for a year. My kitchen was a cupboard with a small convection oven with two electric hotplates imbedded in the top. The bathroom was also a cupboard. The real estate were lethargic and really weren't interested in the property which furnished them with $95-110 per week per flat and there were nearly 30 flats, all owned by the one landlord.
My second house in Ivanhoe came with a cat. Well, not really, but I had selected a cat before moving out from a shelter and visited him every day for a week to scare other potential owners away. I wasn't allowed to buy him and leave him until I moved as they might need the space for another cat, and I certainly couldn't take him with me for a bedsitter and then move again on the weekend. He had to wait it out with me. Fortunately I was successful and Tiberius came home the day I moved in. My Ivanhoe landlord wasn't too bad and I probably would've stayed there if they hadn't decided to kick me out to renovate. I'm sure however that eventually a co-resident would've taken offence to my gorgeous feline who was not permitted by Body Coprporate (clearly my landlord had no idea what was going on).
My third house in three years was a rundown house split in two down the middle, co-renting by a Taiwanese horticulturalist. She got the better light, but I got the new(ish) kitchen and bathroom. The electricity was shared and the bills were enormous. We met when I moved in and she was very pleased to be rid of her old scary neighbours who turned all the heating on and slothed about in wifebeaters and footy shorts. Sadly the bill remained the same and I eventually had a friendly electrician come and test the circuits. He very sneakily charmed his way into her house too, on the basis that it was her finances that were suffering as well. Turns out she slept with an oil heater under an open window all night. $$$$$$$$$! The landlord was also a creep, turning up every other week on the pretence of visiting his shed which was in the back garden. To reach this he walked past my car up the driveway, past my bedroom window and past the bathroom window. He used to like to pop in and knock on the back door, often while I was in the shower. He never fixed anything until I basically threatened him with further action, and then things were fixed without telling me or asking my permission to enter the house. I got a new stove one day when I came home after petitioning about a gas leak since I moved in. (He maintained that he had tested it and it was fine. I queried when he had done this since I had not given him permission to enter the house, and I wanted AGL to come and independently test. Hey look, new stove...). So he was rather creepy.
Tom had since then been selected by Tiberius as appropriate human attache for his owner/staff and with another cat rescued from under the house we needed somewhere bigger to live. Tom lived in a large tumbeldown sharehouse in Ringwood which was sandwiched together at different stages. While it had four bedrooms there were generally about 8 people living there at any one time, plus casual sleepovers on the couch. The kitchen was large and ancient, the bathroom had grown its own mushrooms.
We moved in together in Box Hill in 2007 in a cute two bedroom house in a leafy street. Sounds nice huh? Posssibly too good to be true. We agreed to match another applicants rent offer based on all the utilities being gas, which we were assured of. The condition report also highlighted gas hot water which was a complete lie, and when I argued for a reduction in rent based on our aforementioned agreement I was refused. In 2007 the rental market was really tight and they knew that it would take us ages to find a new place and they would have a new renter almost immediately. So we stayed. The hot water service has been the bane of our lives. Serviced nearly six times, the plumber consistely reports that it needs replacing. But no, the landlord would never do that... Our landlord here actually doesn't live in Australia, so on that basis we are never bothered. While this is a good thing, it also means that things are never fixed. Or fixed in a patchy sort of way. The locks on the windows are just screws. The rotting kitchen splashback was filled with silicon. The ktichen roof leaks in heavy rain as does the front porch. The bathroom pipes block regularly. The kitchen is falling apart from bad workmanship and poor maintenance. I hate this house now, but the market has gone up around us, so the only alternative is to buy.
So like we said, buying is expensive. You need a big deposit. You need a big loan. You pay big taxes. It's a rather crap system. Last Christmas we flirted with the idea of a house in Kalorama, which was gorgeous but in need of serious repair on probably not worth what they were asking With Tom still working in Brooklyn it was a pretty unrealistic idea. We also investigated pre-built housing and/or co-buying with friends and began looking for land in the Eltham/Diamond Creek area. Land out there is hideously expensive and steeply sloping so even with a prebuilt it would be a pain in the neck to organise and probably just as expensive in the long run. So we looked at existing housing in Eltham and basically followed the market for twleve months. The economy has been sluggish and it seemed like eventually we might catch up enough to buy something. Inevitably though we found that most things in our price range were small and often in need of repair which we weren't really interested in.
My real estate email kept coming up with house and land packages in Doreen which we quickly wrote off. Too far, too flat, too cookie-cutter estate like for us. But they were cheap. BUt nasty lookin'.
So we gave up for a while. Then one day I spotted a street I'd never seen: Montsalvat Street. Googling away I found that an estate was built just north of Greensborough on an old farm with Rivergums (that legally they have to keep and build around). The blocks were biggish, skirting Plenty Gorge National Park. Surely an estate like this would not really exist? It does. It's here:
http://www.satterley.com.au/go/residential-estates/riverstone
Which is here:
So we drove up to see how long it would take and what it all looks like. This part of Doreen takes about 30 minutes from my work to get to and it's a really pretty drive through bushland and farmland. The actual estate is surrounded by hills but our block is relatively flat.
Originally we thought that block 916 would be a good one with the long side facing north, but that sold before we could get it. So we swapped our house plans around and bought Lot 923 which is further along the street from the picture above. 447m2
So now we play the exciting game of waiting for the land to be titled and picked each and every fixture and colour for our house. How very enthralling!
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