First Home Buyer Series: Intent Stage

Erica Sachse:

When you decided on Doreen, how did you end up choosing which estate to go with?

Andrew Guest:

At that time, I believe there was only one estate that was still selling and they only had a few blocks left in an area that we sort of wanted, which was quite close to a national park, and we really all like the idea of having that on our doorstep.

Ashlea:

We literally went out there and looked at what it was like and what.

Andrew:

It was this sort of thing… We looked at that area, and it was a five minute decision that

Ashlea:

Which is more established

Andrew:

That we didn’t want to build there

Ashlea:

Yeah.

Erica:

Why?

Ashlea:

It was not as nice, not as green, not as – a little bit further out. It was…

Andrew:

It was. Yeah – it’s gonna cost more as well

Ashlea:

It was, yeah.

Andrew:

Because they – that block of land had like a three metre fall on it and it meant we would had to have like a three tiered retaining wall in our backyard that would took up the entire backyard, which is.

Ashlea:

And just made fencing impossible and like – just things like that. Whereas the… where we are now, we’re a street away from The Gorge, which is a national park, so they’ll never build there. It’ll never be – it’ll never turn into more housing, so it will always be right near parks and nature.

Andrew:

Yeah, it was so much more nature than the…

Ashlea:

Which is nicer

Andrew:

It was the.. It was almost like the place that we looked at had been absolutely stripped out of all its trees and all of its everything, and just thrown houses in the area, whereas this estate sort of felt like that the houses were built around the nature, and kept a lot of the originality of it.

Ashlea:

They’ve left a lot of like the gumtrees and all the natural, like there’s a little pockets in between houses and things everywhere where there’s – yeah, gumtrees- you know it’s just, it was so much more greener. It just felt so much less of like a big estate.

Andrew:

Much nicer place to raise kids.

Erica:

So, when you chose your estate, at what point did you kind of engage with the salespeople, or were they involved the whole time. How did you kind of go about that process?

Ashlea:

We went to land office I think…

Andrew:

Yeah…

Ashlea:

…two or three times?

Andrew:

My sister’s quite involved in the building industry, so she actually called up and teed up a meeting with us the sales office.

Ashlea:

Yeah

Andrew:

of the land and I think we signed there and then and out the very small amount of deposit…

Ashlea:

Yeah

Andrew:

… that It takes to lock the land in. But of course, we still had sort of a retainer where we could back out of it if we wanted to and get all of our money back, but we were very happy.

Ashlea:

We were happy. We were really happy where we were. And like, our friends who were in the estate, they’ve got different stages that were sold earlier and I think we were at just a nicer stage. We waited a little bit longer until the nicer blocks were released. We also put the deposit down at the day of our engagement party. Did you know that?

Andrew:

Hmm no.

Erica:

Oh.

Ashlea:

We went to pay our deposit and then we had our engagement party that day.

Andrew:

Yeah, that’s escaped my memory.

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