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....