Before Christmas Tala and I were looking into buying a house. The most we could afford to borrow was $420,000. The houses in the area where we are renting now go for ~$560,000 – $650,000, so in order to buy we had to look even further out from the city. It already takes me around 1.5 hours to commute into work at Sydney Uni each day, and that is just one way. Furthermore in order to find houses within our proce range we had to head out to these far Western suburbs like Austral and Cobbity. Apart from distance, the reason you have to go so far out to find affordable accomodation is to get away from public transport. If there is even the hint of a possibility of public transport the proces of houses skyrocket. Sadly getting to work each day from so far out with no public transport would be Hellish. In the end we decided it was too much trouble and we couldn’t afford it and so we stopped looking.

We spent Christmas 2011 at my Mum’s 20 acre property just outside of Launceston in Tasmania. The properties on either side of my Mum’s are both 50 acre properties so there is lots of space between everything, plus it is only a 30 minute drive into Launceston. We are always so jealous of everyone when we go down there the way they can live in the clean fresh country, with lots of space, on very affordable blocks too if you look at the prices ($365,000 for a 55 acre property is for sale next door to my mum’s – http://www.realestate.com.au/property-farmlet-tas-exeter-7386851). We wished that either there was a uni where we could work down in Launceston or a place like Launceston up here in Sydney.

While we were in Launceston Tala happened to notice that prices of houses in the upper Blue Mountains here in NSW were still quite affordable. There were some smallish places for ~$300,000 which would mean a mortgage repayment roughly similar to what we are paying in rent now. Most noticable to us though was that block sizes were significanly bigger that you tend to find in the city, particularly in the new developments like those out in the North West. Our current house is around 500m2 as are all the development house blocks in our area where the large houses take up almost the entire blocks. In the Blue Mountains we were noticing the houses we could afford weren’t as big, but the blocks they were on were often 600-900m2. There were also some very oddly shaped blocks, some very long and thin, many covered in bush and others that were very very steep. Those last houses often had great views out over the national park or the ridges they were on, but the houses themselves were crammed onto a tiny piece of flat ground overhanging these cliff edges, so even though the block was technically say 2500m2 it was almost vertical so not very usable.

In Bullaburra we went around to the street behind one house to have a look at where its crazy steep block went down to and acame across this really nice quiet little street called Kingfisher Cresent. Near the top of the street, opposite this really nice house were three vacant blocks. The biggest of them was 4112m2 which is just over an acre. Below is a pictire of the block from above as captured by google maps. I have noted the dimensions of it on the picture.

This is a composite picture of the block from the photos taken from the realestate agents web page.

This is a portion of the same view taken last weekend. The grass is a bit longer and none of those retaining wall pavers are still there. I wonder if someone stole them.

This is take on Tala’s iPad form the top of the little side road looking down towards King Fisher Cres with Tala in the distance looking at one of the for sale signs of the block.

It wasn’t as flat as the other two, nor as cleared so it was also the cheapest at $180,000. When we saw the blocks we got to thinking that maybe it was worth getting an empty block of land and building a kit home on it. A brief search of kit homes suggested you could get pretty decent ones for around $100,000 so all up we might be able to get a house and land for around $300,000 on bigger land and in the Blue Mountains, which was much better that what we were seeing in the city.

When we got home that evening we thought about it some more and have pretty much decided that this is what we will do. For the six years we have been living in our current rental property we have given around $121,000 to our land lords. As with any rental money this is money that we will never see again. Since we will probably be in Sydney for at least another two or so years, we would very much like to not be paing rent to someone else any more if at all possible. I rang the realestate agent this week and found that the block was still for sale, and had actually been reduced to $180,000 from the low 200’s since the owner was keen to sell. Hearing that Tala and I decided to put an offer on the block for $170,000. We are happy to pay $180,000 but you don’t like to seem too keen. I also have an appointment this afternoon with a guy from Aussie home loans to work out how we can finance our venture.

I suspect that I have alot to learn between now and when it is done but it will be alot of fun I think, and very worth while.