Valuation for Construction Back

Another kick in the guts.......

Westpac have come back with an evaluation on our Kurmond Homes house being $30,000 less. This is another kick in the guts and strange seeing that to build similar homes from the likes of Eden Brea, Zac Homes or Metricon we would be paying 100k for the same style and size home.

With all the maths worked out this means we need to find another $16k to $20k now to build our home, before our grant runs out in 4-5 months. If you've read all my blog you would know the debacle with the land we had to use some of our own money for the construction deposit to get the land, roughly $25k. So if the bank/mortgage insurer evaluators didn't screw us in the first place we would be fine. But thanks again to the evaluators where now going to jump through some magic hoops again to get our home built. Taking the house down by 30k wont help either as the value from the bank will come down. We would have to drop $100k to have no issues which means going for a much smaller home, not something where willing to do for a difference of $16k. Keeping in mind we can afford the repayments easily and the bank was happy to lend the full amount until the evaluation came back.

After all this keep in mind we've already paid so much out of our savings. For the house and land so far we have paid out $60,000 of our savings, and we have about $30,000 left for our construction. So by the end of it if we find this $16,000 we would have paid out $106,000 of our own money up front.It's so crazy I should have not paid LMI at all once it's all done.


The bank manager (Aloka) is arguing our case because of everything we've been through and is escalating and trying to get us a better deal. We're expecting to hear something over the next few days. Oh well, off to figure out how we find 16k to 20k now in case this doesn't work. Next stop first though will be to another bank.

Variations and an Update

We've been a bit quiet lately, more so because of work and basketball commitments taking a priority. It's getting exciting over at Jordan Springs, the display village is now open with 16 homes, and 2 more to open in two weeks time. There are so many houses going up also it's really starting to come together. Here's a shot from the car park yetserday, we also got a free sausage sizzle in our park which was great, we all got to wear our lot numbers but sadly I didn't see any neighbours. I did get to meet 2 couples who read this blog funnily enough, nice to meet James, Deon and Ursula. Looks like we're going to have a nice community of people.

We got our construction loan approved on Friday and we're just waiting on an evaluation to come back on the land (Crazy huh - we've had about 4 of those done in the last month). What this means is we should be able to sign the contract next week and our plans will head into Delfin and Jordan Springs.

We still need to go back into Kurmond Homes and finish of our selections but we delayed that so we could make sure we got the banking stuff out of the way. I assume we'll be back in there next week or the week after to pick internals. We had some external variations which I think were priced pretty good. Some things cheaper then others.

Upgrade to Garage door to Ceder - $395
Maroka Upgrade to front Facade (We had some but we made more Moroka) - $620
Upgrade to Translucent windows to Bathroom, Ensuite and W/C - $172
Upgrade to Translucent on Front Door - $45
Upgrade to Taubmans Jarrah on Front Door - $43

To be honest I'm really happy with this.