How to buy a house in NZ

Emma and I want to try to buy a house here in the not too distant future, but buying a house is not really a trivial thing to do. House prizes are soaring and with an interest rate of about 9% you need to spend a huge sum of money to buy a house. In spite of the prizes being very steep already, they are on the rise pretty quickly too so buying as early as possible seems a wise thing to do.

However, before forking out the largest sum of money we will ever spend it might be handy to know what buying a house exactly comprises. Therefore, even though we already had visited quite a few "open homes" (a half hour in which everyone who wants to see a particular house for sale can come and take a look without the owner present), we did not bid on any of them yet.

Then we heard on our favourite radio station, the Breeze, that a free home ownership education course was going to be held. During the course, which would last a whole Saturday, there would be lectures given by a lawyer, a real estate agent, a budget advisor, a mortgage broker, a bank account manager and a building inspector. All for free! That sounded pretty appealing, so we subscribed.

At the beginning of the course we were handed over a thick reference folder, after which the lectures started. All the professionals held their lectures for free, however, they of course hope to gain your business that way. I didn't mind that though, this remains a free country so we will choose whomever we want when we come to it, not just the lecturers :-)

It was very interesting to listen to all these different kind of real estate professionals; they really gave us some good food for thought. Funny enough, they sometimes didn't agree on the same subjects. The lawyer warned us for tricky real estate agents, the real estate agent told us that we could use him to easily arrange a lawyer and a building inspector, the mortgage broker told us that we really should NOT use the lawyer whom the real estate agent had arranged because they might have their own combined agenda, and then the bank account manager added that mortgage brokers are not to be trusted anyway. The pictures of the building inspector added a lot of drama too… don’t you dare to buy a house without a building inspection because it will fall apart as soon as you move in.

Oh well, the day was very interesting nevertheless. A lawyer and a building inspector are not the cheapest people to hire, however, compared to the amount of money you spend on a house the cost is trivial, and money well spent if it guarantees you are not buying a lemon. The way everything was presented was never pushy; everybody was encouraged to make up his or her own mind concerning the worth of everything that was said. All in all we have learnt a lot, and it was enjoyable too.

This course is being held regularly, and I can recommend it to every migrant who wants to buy a house in NZ. In my opinion it is almost a mandatory course if you are planning on buying your first house here. And to top it all off: the course is free!! Talk about value for money :-) If you are interested in going to a course like this too, just drop me a mail so I can give you the address (which for spam reasons etc. I am not posting here).