This is part of a series all about our home. This series details our search for somewhere to settle in New Zealand after moving from the UK, finding that somewhere, getting a house, and making it a home. I’m not sure how long this series will go for…we’ve now moved into our beautiful home but there is much more still to be done!
PART II
If there’s anything that buying a home has taught us, it’s the the importance of being both flexible and adaptable.
In my last blog in Our Home series I spoke about how we eventually began considering Taranaki as a place to settle. We hadn’t completely ruled out other areas of NZ, but we did give Taranaki a good bit of our attention.
We’d found properties around the country that we liked the look of, and went to a number of open homes, but they either didn’t feel quite right, or we ultimately decided we just weren’t getting value for our money.
Then, one afternoon late in November of 2021, I was sitting at my parents’ dining room table when Gareth sat down next to me and showed me a property that made me wonder why we’d wasted our time looking at all of the others.
I couldn’t tell you what it was about this four-bedroom home set on one acre of land. It wasn’t extraordinary for any one reason, but we could just see ourselves living there. And we hadn’t felt that with any of the other properties we’d looked at.
The more we looked at the advertisement for this property, the more we loved it. It wasn’t the lifestyle block we had originally thought we’d end up with (refer to the start of this blog re being flexible and adaptable), but it was in a rural location with plenty of space.
It also just so happened to be down the road from some very good friends of ours. Talk about an added bonus!
Typical of the New Zealand property market, this property had no price advertised alongside it, only that it was a deadline sale set for a few weeks away. After speaking with the real estate agent and confirming that, despite the vendor being deliberately vague about how much they wanted for the property, it was likely within our budget, we started seriously considering this place.
And here’s the second example of how we had to be flexible and adaptable on this journey: it was late 2021 in New Zealand. While much of the rest of the world was getting back to normality, we were still in various states of lockdown.
Mum and Dad’s place, where we were living at the time, was considered part of Auckland for lockdown rules and this property was in Taranaki. We weren’t allowed to travel outside of our region at that time, which meant there was no way we would be able to get down to view the upcoming Open Home.
Fortunately, the real estate agent was kind enough to give us a virtual tour of the property by way of video. After viewing the footage we spent quite a bit of time mulling it over and eventually decided we would make an offer prior to the deadline (we are not known for our speed when it comes to decisions).
And then the deadline was moved forward.
Long story short, we went from having a week to get our ducks in a row to less than 24 hours. It was time to find a solicitor.
Which leads me to the third example of us needing to be flexible and adaptable throughout this process. Not only had the deadline been moved forward, but it had also been moved to the day we were due to travel up to Northland for a long weekend away (lockdown restrictions had finally eased!). First world problems, I know.
I never expected that the first time we attempted to buy a home together we would be sat in our car signing the documentation in a McDonald’s car park while on the phone to the real estate agent, before scanning the paperwork on my iPhone and emailing it away.
As we enjoyed our long weekend away, we spoke a little about the possibility that our offer would be accepted and we’d have a home. Would the search finally be over?
No, it would not.
Unfortunately, our offer was not successful. The eventual buyers offered significantly more than us (and well over market value in our opinion), and so we were back to square one.
It was a return to hours spent searching online, enquiring about asking prices, and attending open homes, never really feeling inspired by anything we viewed.
But by this point we were getting used to being flexible and adaptable, and we began considering an option we’d previously written off.
The property that we were unsuccessful in purchasing was part of a small subdivision of three lots. The vendors had split the original section up, with Lot 1 being said house, Lot 3 being the block of land they were going to keep, and Lot 2 being a rectangular shaped, bare, one-acre block.
Would we be silly to consider building our own home?
My philosophy with anything in life is always to consider our options. Better to know we can’t do something than to not investigate and always be left wondering.
Again, the vendors were very vague about how much they wanted for this one-acre plot of land, but we did a little research and came up with our best guess. Then we enquired with a number of house builders and were surprised to find that it appeared we could build a brand-new home for around the same amount of money we had offered for Lot 1.
We get the location we love, a blank canvas to work from, and a brand-new home. Things were looking up.
So, we made an offer (this time signing the paperwork at Mum & Dad's dining room table and not a carpark) and were delighted to find out that the vendors had accepted it!
As of the beginning of April 2022, we were all set to own our first plot of land together.
Surely the hard part was over now…
Stay tuned for part three, with more learning curves, surprises, highs and lows.
That’s all for now,
Jordyn
“Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.” – Hazrat Inayat Khan
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