Adventures in house hunting: part one

Wishful thinking in Subiaco

We made the decision late last year that buying a house was something that was important to us in the near future. We had just moved back to Perth after spending 10 months in Sydney and made the call to live with my parents while we squirrelled enough money away for our deposit and began researching the market. Though we had bought once before when we were in our late teens (that is a whole other story), it was at the height of the global financial crisis and the housing situation, at least in Perth, is very different now.

In reality, the whole process has taken less than five months since coming back from Sydney, though it sometimes felt much longer than that - try moving back home shortly after getting married when your other siblings are still living in that same house! But taking that time to save on rent and put aside as much money as possible was absolutely the best decision in the end because it helped us reach our goal so much faster.

Despite the relatively short time frame for everything, I'm not going to lie - the search was hard going and soul-destroying in many ways. Much of the optimism I had when we started the process was quickly dashed when I realised just what you can get for your money here in one of Australia's key boom towns. I.e. not much. For the same price as a four-by-two historic house in many parts of the US, you'd be lucky to get a two-bed apartment in a less than desirable suburb here. Yep, we're living in the lucky country and that sure comes at a price. But there's really no point lamenting over the housing situation here - it is what it is, and I still agree it's better to enter the market sooner rather than later while prices continue to rise.

So we had been browsing online for a couple of months while we saved and had not seen too much that we could even consider buying, until the perfect little place came along. It was in one of our favourite suburbs, had the sweetest picket fence, more space than we were expecting and this exposed brick wall in the kitchen that I fell in love with. And best of all, it was hugely under our upper price limit, we hadn't seen anything even close in price. We hadn't quite saved what we had hoped for the deposit by that point but knew we had to see it, so we headed along to the home open to see if the villa was all it was cracked up to be.

And it looked even better in real life. I fell in love and knew we needed to have it. We put what we thought was a generous offer on it that afternoon (above the asking price) and waited to hear back, confident that our refusal to low-ball on the price would hold us in good stead. Long story short, several offers were submitted in the property's first day on the market and we weren't successful. I found out that it ended up selling for 10 per cent more than the asking price, which is massive - back when we bought our first place you could offer that much less than the asking and have it accepted.

What was perhaps most upsetting was how the real estate agent ran the offer process like a silent auction. He urged us to put our highest offer in from the get-go, but we had no idea what was a fair price to pay for the villa over the asking price. In hindsight we probably would have been willing to offer more to secure it, but we weren't even given the opportunity, which is not only unfair for the buyers but also for the seller as they could have potentially made even more money. 

I kept second-guessing our offer and felt so disappointed we missed out on what seemed like our dream home. But as they say, every cloud has a silver lining and ours was about to come along - so stay tuned for part two of our house hunt!