Losing a relocation house and a beautiful block of land to the competitive COVID house market was a tough pill to swallow but to help us cope, we are reliving the pain so that you can learn from our mistakes. Skip to the bottom to see our top tips for avoiding misery.

R.I.P. House 99

If you have never been to a removal house yard, it’s a truly bizarre experience. You walk through a giant industrial yard like you are walking down the aisles of a gigantic grocery store. There is the cute little Queenslander colonial house with the gables, the fugly dated retro home with all brown everything, the container site office, the broken down council house, and everything in between. You walk into each house like a larger, dustier version of IKEA, and try your best to mentally replace the giant holes in the floorboards and old peeling paint, and jigsaw cuts in the ceiling, with an imaginary beautiful future dream of awesome and wonder. It’s a real trip and definitely worth a look if you are in the area.

We went a couple times to a few different places and while a lot have charm and character, the only one that really stood out as close to feasible for our budget was this cute little triple gable Queenslander with a bay window, french doors, VJ walls, timber floors, and a small back deck. At first it seemed a bit small and in horrific shape, but we eventually saw the potential and the charm of it and for a cool $66k incl moving costs, this seemed liked a no brainer. After drawing it up in a basic 3D modelling website we started thinking we could make it work.

The owner of the removal company, David Wright, and the staff entertained all of our newbie questions and were super patient with our nagging emails. They told us in passing it had come from Albion and I went down a Google Maps street view and QImagery rabbit hole and found where it had originally sat, 56 Albion Rd, Albion, and when it was built etc. We went to see it one more time to confirm and facetimed the Canadian family from inside and sent them old photos to look at. After seeing a post about extending/joining removal houses, we thought “Ok the back room is a little small but we can get them to leave a gap when they put the house back together, #ohmygodhowsmartisthatthisisgoingtobesoawesome”.

We had one more meeting with mortgage people so we could feel confident locking it in then when we checked the website to look at one of the pictures to see which way the floorboard ran, we see the dreaded “under contract” label on the picture of the house and our hearts sank all the way back to 1950’s Albion. We had waited too long and the house was gone.

Losing the plot

Two weeks later, we had made a trip to Brisbane to look at another house that we thought might work. On the way back we stop in at a friend’s place to catch them up on the house hunt. Our voices are chipper as we share some ideas about the house we just saw and how it will fit perfectly on this block we had been eyeing off for a few weeks.

This block was legit. A terraced garden with a great view looking northwest over the rolling hills, prime spot in between Flaxton and Mapleton, and it had fruiting avocado and lime trees! We saw it listed at 15% above our budget then it dropped by about 5% and we thought maybe it would drop again so we kinda sat for a bit. “Maybe we could lowball them” we naively thought. We had just had the Aussie parents out to take a look the day before. We even threw the old man’s drone in the air for a spin. I stayed up late nights to learn how to 3D model the terrain so we would know exactly what kind of slope we had and what extra costs would be involved.

After sharing around pictures of the lot and ideas about this new house we had seen, I reach for my phone to check the time and see an email from the realtor:

“Bad news for you Matt I'm afraid. An unconditional offer has come in on the block today and has been accepted. I'll let you know if I come across anything else. Best of luck to you.”

I silently held up my phone to share the email with everyone and slumped into my chair. “This fucking sucks” is all I can really muster. We eventually leave our friends place and take the emotionally long journey on the Bruce Highway back up to the Sunshine Coast.

It’s 6pm. The bright yellows and reds of the sunset over the Glasshouse Mountains throw a dim silhouette of the monolithic rockscape across the darkening horizon. I take three deep breaths and heave a big heavy sigh. It still doesn’t feel better yet. Each sigh I think, man maybe this next breath will make the huge bummer go away. Hmm, still there. As the sun goes down, we walk back down from the Wild Horse Mountain lookout to our car and we drive home to another night of looking for “vacant land sunshine coast” on search engines and real estate websites.

What did we learn?

While we faffed and fawned over the future of House 99, someone else was ready and willing to pull the trigger and so they came up with the goods. As we hummed and hah’d about whether we wanted the hilly avocado block, someone on lockdown in Sydney snapped it up unconditional. I remember beating myself up thinking maybe that we could have been more organised. I also remember embarassingly desperately emailing and calling the realtor and house removal companies several times imagining some sort of hail mary come-from-behind victory in the dying minutes?But alas we just had to eat it, and so our avocado dreams were squashed by our indecision and we had to start from scratch. But while it was painful, it was the perfect exercise really in figuring out a few key principles of this game we find ourselves playing:

Stick to your budget
We got stuck a little in investing our time in a lot that was realistically outside our budget from the get-go. If you have landed on a number, and are confident in that number. Then investing in anything outside that budget is always at risk of being a distraction or an energy drain.
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch
Doing analysis or assessment is different to getting emotionally invested. It’s hard not to picture where a kitchen will go but not to picture yourself in that kitchen, making eggs and coffee, and getting excited about how cool this imaginary kitchen is. It’s not yours until you have an accepted offer, and even then, shit can hit the fan. So always remember to approach your analysis with a little bit of separation, for your own mental health really.
Ask the right questions
We were getting lost in asking questions that didn’t matter so much like where the house was from, and what the kitchen would look like. If I could get the time back I would ask maybe more pointed questions:
- Can this house be extended when it’s put back together or not?
- Where will the cut line be for this house?
- What contract conditions are available for a removal house?
The more viewings the merrier
The more viewings that you can arrange (of houses, land, kitchens, anything), the more finetuned your radar will be for what is good/bad and what you like/don’t. Property investor and mortgage broker, Victor Kalinowski, says “I think you should physically look at 20 or more properties in the area, which are similar to the area / home you are considering, over a 6 month period”. So better get cracking!
Know your conditions and clauses
There is a great conveyancing website that has a gigantic free list of special conditions and clauses that can be put on an offer. I recommend reading it as it starts to frame what can and can’t be put as conditions. Obviously some of these are ridic and everything depends on the seller and the realtor, but it is good to start getting familiar with what is legally possible, then be prepared with the right wording when the time comes?
Act rationally / Don’t burn bridges
Even if you feel like shouting at someone or getting angry that you didn’t get your way, it’s almost never the right move. Realtors can be aggressive or unhelpful on one sale just because you are realistically not going to be the right buyer for that house, but the next seller, they might be willing to budge. No matter what the circumstances are, it’s always best to be civil and honest. There is a way to say “I am disappointed that when we discussed this, you didn’t make me aware of…” without adding “you f***ing twathead dinglefister”. We had a really rocky start with the brokers we ended up buying our house off and if we had burned that bridge early, I can guarantee we wouldn’t have gotten the house.