THE FIRST FAILURE

 

On our 8th week of looking we finally saw a house that we thought we could live in: 26 Cummins St, Willagee. It wasn't perfect - almost too big and without the spacious alfresco area I'm hanging out for - but within 6 minutes walk of a little shopping strip with an IGA, a bar, a cafe, fish and chip and pizza shops, a medical centre, a library and a bus stop (although there is only one bus an hour).

Willagee is a suburb south east of Fremantle and not one that we had on our shopping list or knew but during a consulation process with friends who live south of the river we were encourgage to think seriously about it.

And there's the rub. You barely get any time to do that. A fifteen minute inspection on the morning of Saturday 1 March, a text from the agent saying all offers needed to be in by 4pm Sunday 2 March, a drive back on the Sunday to check the neighbourhood, some frantic research to try and work out what a house like this in a suburb like this might be like and then you have to commit.

The main buying process in Perth is that you make an offer and it has to be your best offer because there's no negotiation. It's not the auction environment in Melbourne where you get to see the competitors and can keep upping your offer until you reach your limit. For the Pink House, people had 3 or 4 visits and the chance to get building inspections done before the sale. But not in Perth.

We're pretty well placed in some ways - we're cash buyers that can make a quick sale - but by Monday 3 March it was all over and done. We'd put in an offer higher than any comparable house sold in Willagee over the last 6 months but with the condition that there was a building inspection. And someone else put in a higher offer without any conditions.

I wish I could say we'd learnt from this failure but I still don't know how to pick the right price point and who is going to spend millions on a house without an inspection?

Oh well. Onto the next opening.

The only benefit of this 48 hours of madness was that we discovered the best 'crossanterie' ever. Tasty bacon/maple syrup or pesta/sundried tomato savoury pastries as well as the standard but well made almond croissants and pain au chocolat. We'll be back.

PS It turns out that the winning bid was only $10k more than ours. Why didn’t the agent come back and check with us? By not doing so, the owner lost out as well. If one was engaging in conspiracy theories, one might think that the real estate agent was doing some other buyer a favour.


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