The right place for us

The right place for us

After finding all of the sales people that couldn't help us along came Averil.

I don't know how many houses you have to build before you start to really comprehend the process but this is our 3rd and i still think we are total novices. I had someone ask me last month "what pitfalls should i look out for?" my response was you don't know you need to look out for it until its too late so all you can do is make sure that the people you choose to help you through the process are the best at what they do.

Choosing the house design seemed relatively easy. Adam and i had a few things we were after

1. a massive master bedroom with a spa
2. an open plan living, dining, kitchen
3. 3 bedrooms + study 
4. a second living area

from this we were able to bring all of metricons amazing designs down to 2. The cedar and the jasper, the Cedar is a 2 storey and more expensive but we figured what we spend extra on the build we would save on land.

The hunt for the land began!!! 

(note when you see green writing i am about to get on my soap box) 

let me just say finding land online is really frustrating. why can't realestate agents update a listing when they have sold it!!!!! Adam and i would think we have found the perfect block so we would send it to Averil to see if it would work with our house design, she would send it back with the thumbs up for us to contact the agent and find out it was sold a month ago. We learnt quickly to check with the agent before sending it through. Thank goodness realestate.com.au keeps the content of your previous enquiry so my generic request was "hi is this property still on the market, please let me know via phone or email, thanks"

 I think we've found it!! we came across a block of land with a 18 metre frontage (pretty rare) so we made an offer but we weren't successful. What a bummer, it was in such a good spot, directly opposite the lighstview estate (city side) all the benefits of the estate but half the price. There had to be something else on this street that we could get our hands on.

We  stumbled across another one where the block had already been split leaving 9.6 meters frontage mmm i needed a minimum of 10m so i gave Averil a quick call. She told me there was an adapted design for a duplex that we could use, it all seemed to be falling into place so i called the agent but no answer. The agent didn't call me back so i tried again, still no response so i called the office (maybe he was on holidays) NOTHING. well this is CRAP how much do i have to chase someone to make a $200,000 purchase, i was over it. About 2 weeks passed and we still couldn't find anything that matched the brief as well as the no response agent's block so i made 1 last phone call and i got to talk to someone. The land was under offer but it looked like there was some problems with the cooling off. No more mucking around i said if it falls through i will offer full asking price 10% deposit 4 week settlement. I got a call at the end of the week to say that the contract ended up going through so i couldn't get the block :( HOWEVER the owner also owned the one next door and may be open to the idea of selling that too. The next day the owner gave permission to the agent to sell it, DONE contracts signed easiest commission that agent no call has ever made.

Within the week of signing for the land we had signed to quote with metricon to build the Cedar
http://www.metricon.com.au/nsw/homes/cedar

let the dream begin!!

Decisions - Henley Homes vs Metricon

This isn't the first time we've built a house but it's the first time we have built a house for us so it may as well be!

STEP 1, Finding a Builder

we found the dream house, it's built by Henley Main Vue and it's called the Almalfi. It has a beautiful huge, i mean HUGE master bedroom/retreat, butlers pantry, open plan living dine a study and 3 spare bedrooms (for extra shoes). We both agreed (which was a miracle) so all we needed to do was find a block of land that it would fit on.

We explained to the sales rep (let's call him Dave to protect him) that once we could find the land we would sign the contract so any help with finding land 10km from the city North or North East would be appreciated. Dave was very helpful with this and called me the next week to explain he had found some land at Campbelltown (a little more than 10km but we were still listening) I asked what the frontage was and he said 12 meters, pity the house we had discussed required a minimum 17 metres frontage.

We kept looking for ourselves when we came across a block of land at Rostrevor, we dropped in to see Dave again to ask if the Almalfi would fit. We didn't know much about building envelopes & block orientation etc etc so really needed Dave's help on this. Dave confidently responded "just buy the block, we'll work it out" mmmmm i don't think so.

Starting to get frustrated we called Henley head office to explain we want to buy one of their houses, the "Almalfi' but just need a little bit of help with finding the right block to build it on. Head office was really good, they passed on our details to their senior sales rep. He contacted us within the week and asked us to send him an email a link to the block we were considering and the house we wanted to build so he could send back a site plan. Great we were finally getting somewhere. PING the email was responded to within about 10 minutes, excited i opened it to see that senior had sent me the site plan with the wrong house on it.
This was officially in the too hard basket, time to consider another builder

The next few weekends passed by visiting display homes, having sales reps promise to call us back (still waiting). We started to wonder, were we expecting too much? I work in sales myself and know what level of service i offer so was it wrong to expect the same. But we had experienced great service, we had built before and had great service from the rep, she was really good.

Time warp: 4 years Adam and i decided to build our first investment property, we were GREEN, really GREEN, we came across a sales rep that rather than taking advantage of this held our hands through the whole process and explained all of the things that we didn't even know we needed to ask.

There was our answer we needed to find that sales rep wherever she was and see if they could build a house we like (rather than finding a house we like and hoping they employed good sales people)


We had found her, our building Angel and she was working for METRICON.Google, Averil Garrett