Land ahoy!

So today, we had to go to the Land Office in Eden Green, Hammond Park to pay the deposit for the land and essentially 'buy' the lot we're after. Martin Hardodo from Richard Noble was very friendly and made the signing and payment go smoothly. At the end we got a little calico bag with a notebook and pen, all with Eden Green written on it.

This was so exciting, I couldn't help but take photos of the block and surrounding parks!

Our block! For some reason there was a Home Buyers Centre sign there, which was weird...

 

 

View from the back of the block to the street. You can see where we've marked in the sand the corner of the house and the 'dead side' of the house.

Local park a mere 1 minute walk away. Which has lighting at night too!

More of the same park. Kind of resembles Curtin Uni bus bays, but there's no bus stop here! Who knows, maybe in the future?

The Eden Green Land Sales sign with map of the Eden Green estate.

Large sports oval with playground. A sporting club building is going to be built here later on.

Different view of the oval.

The playground. There's also free BBQ's you can use and seating. This area is lit up at night as well.

Signing our life away...

We just came back from signing off on the main structural plans with Ryan down at the Celebration Homes display home in Eden Green, Hammond Park. Very exciting! Paid our $1500 deposit, which is non refundable.... so we better get finance approval! Hahaha! Mark from Resolve Finance reckons we will be fine. We also were given our Pre-Start folder with all the coloured brochures in there. There is also sheets of paper to fill in ie. colourbond colour, tiles etc. Sooo many decisions to be made.... I can see why they give you the folder straight away!

We met with Mark yesterday after work at 5pm to sign all the mortgage docs for the pre-approval. He was very good. made everything make sense and was very thorough.


All very exciting! We only needed to make a few minor changes to the Polaris plans (see below).

Decisions, decisions...... Celebration Homes or Homebuyers Centre?

Today we met with Ryan from Celebration Homes and then Troy from Homebuyers Centre. Both builders had a plan that Warren and I both liked, but now we had to decide which builder we were going to go with. 

Celebration Homes seemed to have better value for money. A larger home with all name branded appliances (900mm) and good quality fittings. Homebuyers Centre had no name branded appliances (600mm) and fittings that weren't as good quality as Celebration Homes. Both homes were around the same price as well with all the changes we made (which wasn't much). 

We ended up running late with the meeting with Ryan, as he went through everything and was very thorough. He then showed us through the Pre-Start Room where all the products for your home are. From bricks, tiles, light fittings, basins, bath, toilet, laminex, etc etc. It was wonderful! Basically everything is standard but if you want to upgrade and pay for it, those items were stickered clearly with a Celebration Homes orange star. Apparently only a few builders in WA have this. We both didn't like the thought of going to all the different shops to choose tiles, carpets etc etc. The convenience of having it all in one place won us over.

What we also found out that Homebuyers Centre is targetted towards the lower level first home buyers market, and Celebration Homes is targetted towards the mid-level to high market. This made us feel quite confident with our finance application. 

We met with Troy from Homebuyers Centre a bit late, and to be honest, we had already made our mind up. But we met with him anyway to see what Homebuyers Centre could offer us. Homebuyers Centre home was smaller, but you would get more yard.... but then Celebration Homes had a home that was perfect, but ofcourse, a smaller yard. We decided we'd drop by the block in Hammond Park, to see if we could make a decision. 


The verdict..... Celebration Homes with the Polaris!

Polaris - Elevation chosen during meeting today (minus the middle windows).

Polaris - Flipped due to orientation best suited to our block.

10km closer to the city makes a lot of difference

We thought it best to let our parents know what we were doing and the liklihood of us building in Wellard. Warren's parents were supportive. But my parents were worried about how far away Wellard was. Also, my Dad has had previous experience in that area with his job (jack of all trades) and commented on the area being too close to dodgy suburbs like Leda. 

With the particular finance product we were going to get, we needed a block that was part of a development site that included landscaping and fencing. We went home and searched online for what we could in the price range of up to $200k for a block of land. No luck, everything would have been too small. We re-did the figures and saw that we really could afford spending more on land to be closer to the city. Another 10km closer in fact! This would bring us to Hammond Park, ocean side of the freeway, and 25min from the city. Sure we'd be paying an extra $88k for the same amount of land, but this way we were in a private estate without any homeswest houses and closer to the city. There were more bonuses like being 8 minutes from the beach, 15 minutes from Fremantle, 10 minutes from Cockburn Marina, 5 minutes from Cockburn Gateway Shopping Centre, and Public Transport being very accessable for me close by. Eden Green here we come!

Aerial view of Eden Green private estate in Hammond Park.

Buy or Build?

So we're saving our pennies, and we think we'll be ready around July 2011 to buy a home. But do we buy established or build? It's very tricky. We would both like to stay close to Victoria Park or even where we're renting now in Beckenham, but for the price of houses and what you get in terms of land, it's just not worth it. The hard reality is, to get more bang for your buck you have to buy in the more outer suburbs. 

So this led us to start looking at established, fairly new, houses in Bertram on Sunday just gone. There was a house or two that were brilliant. But most were in poor condition (nothing like the photos online!) and the surrounding parks, lawns etc. looked dead and not kept well. Basically we were disappointed. 

So today, I took Rec Leave and we left to look at the price of building in Wellard, which is the next suburb over. It has it's own train station and a new shopping precinct being built. Land is about $200k for 500m2 which isn't bad. Then a 4 by 2 being built on top of that including site works would probably bring it up to $400k. 

There were quite a few nice houses in Wellard. We were mainly interested in one that Homebuyers Centre had and one that Celebration Homes had. So now we are meeting with Troy from Homebuyers and Ryan from Celebration Homes in the coming few days to discuss pricing and finance. Apparently we CAN build and buy now with a product from Resolve Finance which has a Loan Assist Personal Loan that tops up your deposit on your Home Loan. No one else is doing this, thus when we heard about this, we just knew we couldn't wait until July! Now, to just see if we qualify....