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@Rancid-Schnitzel said in Housing hornets' nest:
What is weird is that there is one suburb, 16km from the CBD, that the Chinese have zeroed in on and is going ape shit in terms of prices. The prices there are ridiculous for an area that is, to put it mildly, pretty shit.
Sounds a bit like Eastwood (or "Eastwoong" as some lairs are calling it). Older, post-war builds on what was the edge of Sydney. Lovely trees and parks and whatnot, but some of that shit is just falling down.
And I don't get it either.
Brisvegas and Melbourne are in a bit of an oversupply crisis for apartments. Apparently there are some good prices to be had BUT you might struggle to rent them out.
I suppose I was extremely lucky to get in when I did. I worry a bit for the kids, but then the landscape will be totally fucking different when they're heading into the market, and I suppose at this point I'll be helping them in some fashion.
Maybe they can rent my investment property off me If I ever get one.
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@NTA said in Housing hornets' nest:
@Rancid-Schnitzel said in Housing hornets' nest:
What is weird is that there is one suburb, 16km from the CBD, that the Chinese have zeroed in on and is going ape shit in terms of prices. The prices there are ridiculous for an area that is, to put it mildly, pretty shit.
Sounds a bit like Eastwood (or "Eastwoong" as some lairs are calling it). Older, post-war builds on what was the edge of Sydney. Lovely trees and parks and whatnot, but some of that shit is just falling down.
And I don't get it either.
Brisvegas and Melbourne are in a bit of an oversupply crisis for apartments. Apparently there are some good prices to be had BUT you might struggle to rent them out.
I suppose I was extremely lucky to get in when I did. I worry a bit for the kids, but then the landscape will be totally fucking different when they're heading into the market, and I suppose at this point I'll be helping them in some fashion.
Maybe they can rent my investment property off me If I ever get one.
Yep, it is a very mixed market here at the moment. Some suburbs going off, others going to shit. And, yes finding tenants is a real concern. We sold our investment property late last year and I was very happy to get rid of the farking thing.
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One of the things that has struck me is the first 3 houses I lived in as a kid were fricking shitholes. Old drafty places that my old man spent every weekend working on, "gardens" that were old stumps, blackberry & so on. I was 25 before I lived in a house with 2 toilets. My neice is currrently house hunting with her boyfriend & every house they looked at is pretty much perfect, ensuites, landscaped lawns. Its basically finished.
A fucking ensuite in a "starter" house. One of our places "technically" had a second toilet. It was in the garage and had a curtain not a door.
On the flip side I'm not sure the current 20-30 year old generation have been taught the basic skills to replace a tap washer let alone re-do a house. So even if they bought a shit hole they'd have to pay for someone to do it. We did up all our houses & it was always just my old man & my mum painting & knocking out walls & wallpapering & so on. Its all good to tell young kids to do that, but its a learned skill, if they didn't learn it they aint got it. My grandad taught my dad a huge amount, he taught me a fair bit, I'll realistically pass down phoning a Polish bloke to my kids.
I think there's also a case that those shithole houses are bought up buy speculators & professionals, not 1st timers, you go try buy a meth house in NZ its not 20 young couples bidding against you, its 5 professional builders.
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@gollum that's houses now. They are all built big. All have ensuites. Those shitholes you lived in 30 years were done up and flipped years ago; or bulldozed. Building codes; compulsory building inspections; insurance requirements; bank lending criteria, council red tape, all of those things make what you talk about very very hard.
A woman who works for me bought a doer-upper just before christmas. It sounds like the worst thing in the world. They have spent every spare moment since then working on it. Tiling, painting etc. They are lucky her husband is a tradie, otherwise they could never do it. And the kids just have to suck it up, mum and dad need to work on the house.
There have been a few articles here on the dramatic slow-down in building approvals. It appears there is demand to build, but there are so many roadblocks. Council regulations get tighter every year (some of the hoops we have had to jump through, some resulting in major redesign). The guys building on either side of us had the same issues. We also ran in to issues with the bank, as they will lend on value, not price. So they employed a valuer to value a house that hadn't even been certified yet, let alone build. We were lucky that we could afford the gap between valuation and price. The guy next to us could not, so had to scrap his plans and start again. Apparently it is a significant issue here in Cairns, so either the build price, or the valuation model, is out of whack.
Housing is a fucking nightmare.
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my first home (bought in 2004 after I came back from England) had wooden window frames, shitty wallpaper and in need of a paint inside and out.
We got aluminium joinery throughout, this created another issue...a draughty house keeps fresh air so doesn't have much condensation, aluminium sealed her up tight, so we had to install a DVS to deal with that...we re-roofed, re-carpeted, stripped walls, painted, had insulation blown into the outer walls of bedrooms, new kitchen, added an office/small bedroom, heat pump and fenced the property...
What we sold it for, I reckon we only made $30k on it after taking into account what we spent over the 8 years we were there, but most of it needed sorting so we could live in a healthy home.
We built our next one, always spending money on the garden now!!
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Yep single glazed aluminium windows suck , if you can pay the extra go for thermally broken double glazed.
There is still a decent amount you can do on your house if you want to under Schedule 1 so it's worth a look if you do want to do some work to your house.Also I find the whole idea of McMansions bizarre, they cost more to heat , more to paint , more to maintain etc and studies have shown that people only use a small percentage of the space anyway . I'm enjoying the articles about tiny houses , some of them are very well thought out.
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we never considered double glazing when we did our old place, but have double glazing in our new house, for those 4 days of the year it gets that cold
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@jegga I won't say much, as the new one we are building is pretty big, but designed for in 8 years time when we have two teenage boys.
The ones i don't understand are where you buy a small section and fill it with house. And your neighbours do the same. And everyone is just jammed in.
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@mariner4life that is all to do with zoning under the council plans.
Properly in town they are allowed to build closer to the boundaries, less issues with daylight angles and stuff....but other designated areas may have other regulations around property sizes for sub-division and density.
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@mariner4life said in Housing hornets' nest:
@jegga I won't say much, as the new one we are building is pretty big, but designed for in 8 years time when we have two teenage boys.
The ones i don't understand are where you buy a small section and fill it with house. And your neighbours do the same. And everyone is just jammed in.
There's lots of new building where I work, I drive around and see the new empty sections for sale. They often have little sign posts showing the size of the section. Most average around 400sq mtrs, tho I have seen a few at 300 - 350 sqm.
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@mariner4life I've got one teenage boy and the house seems to double in size when he goes back to stay at his mums for a week .
Some if the places I've seen are like 300 sq m but they scrimp on materials or trades to fit within their budget which will come back to haunt them or the next owner 10 years down the track. -
when I was working at the council I was doing a permit for a house that was on an 800sqm section, basically in a pizza wedge shape, and had been sub-divided straight down the middle, the existing bach being shifted 3m to allow for another equally small house to be built next to it....mental!
Always remember driving through Orewa (before the tunnel) and seeing all those houses jammed in so close, you could shake hands with your neighbor if you both leaned out your window and thnking wtf
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The reason for building large houses is that there is stuff all money in small ones unless you are building in large scale, so smaller developers and building companies avoid them.
Also, attached garages count as part of the floor area, so that increases the stats without actually increasing the house size.
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@jegga said in Housing hornets' nest:
@Godder I don't think it's the building firms pushing big houses it's the consumers . Bigger floor area doesn't necessarily translate to a much larger cost especially if the standard of fitout in the larger home is to a lower spec .
That too, but if a builder can make the same percentage margin on a big house as a small house, and both are the same amount of work for the builder / project manager, they're going to give preference to the big houses.
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A block around the corner from me - similar size of around 550sqm, but just land - sold for $720K a few weeks back.
They'll fill it up with a gigantic fucking two-storey I reckon, because it will maximise their resale in a few years.
The idea now with new developments is to have a local park as a play area, not a backyard in every house.
There are some nearby selling 300sqm blocks for over $400K.
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@jegga said in Housing hornets' nest:
Yep single glazed aluminium windows suck , if you can pay the extra go for thermally broken double glazed.
So true. Pretty easy to add double glazing to a lot of them but you can't retrofit a thermal break.
In our latest round of reno's we insulated the exterior walls of our bedrooms and lounge/kitchen and added foam insulation around the doors and window frames. Made a huge difference in retaining heat and getting rid of any drafts. But you still get condensation on the aluminium frames. Double glazing will help a bit but you still have the frame connecting inside and outside conditions.
We'd like to build at some point but not keen at all on a house that occupies 90% of the land and is made of balsa wood! See enough of that over our back fence at the Aotea development in Porirua. Not our cup of tea! nor in our price range which may be why I'm salty on them ha ha
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I'm still living in the first home I bought (in NZ).
when I bought it I thought - will it do me until I die? Yes. Good where do I sign?
I could so easily have upgraded over the years - got a place with a view, pool, on the coast, parking for cars I don't own and a bathroom for every day of the week.
Not doing so is the best financial decision I have ever made.
I've spent a fair bit on it over the years and done a lot myself - reroofed, painted it twice (overdue a repaint now but struggling to bring myself to do it) and now its comfortable like an old favourite jersey.
I might sell down and take some cash out but more than likely I will die there.
However there is no way on earth I can imagine how I could afford to buy it now and I earn reasonable coin.
$300K deposit. My parents were poor. I can't see how anyone can come up with that sort of cash unless they have a massive head-start in life.
If I were starting out I don't think I'd bother. I've lived in countries where home ownership was not the norm and everyone seemed happy.
We need a paradigm shift away from your house being your only asset - which of course would lead to cheaper housing too in the long run
Housing hornets' nest