Exciting times ahead, we purchased a property! Now of course our blog will be taking a turn from traveling (though we hope to do that too) to house renovation! If this is your thing please keep reading. This is not a fast in and out lick of paint so strap yourselves in, we are rolling up our sleeves and getting dirty!

I can’t talk yet about another couple of properties we are doing some due diligence on so I will just make this blog about our definite project.

As you know we had the property blues. All of these ones we thought we could do kept slipping through our fingers. Frustration was at an all time high. We cast our net wider. Our wonderful friend and real estate agent Leona from Professionals was kind enough to let us use her office. She gave us the keys to her red door and we got full use of the computer and printer. We got on trademe and went through every property in every location in the Waitaki district we thought could be a go. We didn’t stick to Ōamaru like we initially thought we would. After a few hours we got down to about 10 potential properties. Ones we even didn’t think were worth considering, like a mortgagee sale we take a look at. We fired off a bunch of calls, emails, texts and then we hit the road to look at an open home.

Here is an 1880s cottage, going at mortgagee sale with no land (we want land), in dire need of some attention.

The agent said, “sign this safety form, I have been in here once today, I am not doing it again!” Daryl is so put off by it I can’t help but think great, this means he will put off a lot of buyers! This property is a good project but a distraction from our goal. We put it in our back pocket as a potential Christmas job if we have nothing better to do.

Our week continues on, we try with all our might to get another under contract. Offering a high price which we thought would do the trick. It gets put on hold until the deadline sale. So we pull the contract and ignore the agent until the deadline. A calculated risk, that we hoped would pay off later. A burnt out property in Waimate is coming up for auction, do we want it? It is worth a bit once all back in place. The problem is we cannot fix this one, it is a demolition and start again. We go to auction with this one, but really don’t want it. We just do a phone bid as we couldn’t say no for a certain price! It ends up reaching $185k which is worth it to the purchaser, but not us.

We low ball a few sections with contracts and due diligence, nothing really happens. We eat and breathe property all day everyday and don’t have much time for anything else. While in the back ground we get some small progress with our land in Herbert.

I spray the perimeter fences, gorse, thistles and broom. We talk to Chris, our neighbour and digger man. A decision is made to make a pad on the land to get our crap from Christchurch to here. We end up meeting our lovely neighbour Jim who has a big tractor and he comes and cuts the grass for us. We sling him some beer as a thank you!

We set up this camper trailer to hold our garden equipment, do you like our $2 seal? He protects the goodies inside haha.

After our Waimate auction the deadline is due for this property we tried to get before the deadline. I will go into all the details later, but we put another contract in $15k less than we had before.

Thursday arrives, we get a message from another agent to say, hey the vendor is going to sign your offer, I will let you know when it is done. Okay cool, we now have due diligence to do on a section. We get in the car and head to Timaru for the auction on the mortgagee sale. While on the way we finally have confirmation for the one we offered less on. Now we have another property to do due diligence on.

Before heading to this auction, we think we better talk to an insurance broker, we need some form of insurance between auction and settlement in 28 days. We assume all the risk and the vendor could literally burn it to the ground and we still have to pay for the property.

We are discussing our price at which we can’t not buy this mortgagee sale, (27 Till Street). I do a quick cost in the car, on what it is likely to cost us to renovate, $50k+, it does need a lot to make it into a home. An hour of chatting and going back and forth we arrive at Harcourts and sign the paperwork to bid. We bump into Jan another agent we have tried to buy a property off in the past. A quick meeting between us outside and we discuss, $140k is our limit. Rowan says he hasn’t read the LIM (land information memorandum), I have. We quickly grab it and read through it again. Rowan is literally reading the LIM as the auctioneer does his introduction. “This is an as is where is mortgagee sale….”

The bidding begins, I leave Rowan to bid as he is the one who signed the documents. It stalls at our bid of $136k. They go off to see if it is on the market, which basically means any bid from here buys it. They come back in the room and say it is. Finally the other bidder comes to life as he didn’t want to bid until it was. We were going up in $1k increments. My heart was pounding. When it reached $153k I thought we had it. But no it continues, we finally have the hammer fall and we win for $166k. Well that is over budget haha.

Well I guess we have a house now, four walls and a roof, quite different to living in a tent. As I said it never rains it pours. We have 3 properties now, one confirmed and two to work out if we want them! I am not sure exactly what we will do with this place obviously fix it up and live in it. It will take some time to make it habitable.

So here are some more photos of the huge job he have ahead of ourselves. We won’t sleep well for the next 28 days with no insurance. We know the vendor has been working well with the agent, helping clear out the hoarding (two skip bins) and allowing people in to view. So here we hope she doesn’t damage it further. She paid $91k so I am hoping a good portion of what we paid reaches her pocket.

The other bidder Luke, who Leona knows does this quite a lot. Buys the old properties and does them up. He normally has a budget of $100k, we hopefully won’t spend that much on it to get the house liveable. His budget was $160k so he went up another $5k to try secure it. Coming up two years without a house, it is going to be strange having four walls and a roof.