If you have been reading this site for a while you probably would have read about some of the things that we went through while purchasing and then selling our old house. If you haven’t read it here is a link to the article, Young and Naive, I’ll wait until you’ve had a chance to read it…

Okay, now that you are back (or did you ever leave?) I will tell you another story about buying a house, our house.

The company was selling the house that we are currently living in was Coral Sea Properties. They have actually been the company to buy and sell the house the last three times. This seems to indicate to me pretty good service as people have been happy both purchasing and selling their house through them.

The service that we got from Coral Sea Properties was actually quite good. They gave us mostly realistic information (they made some things seem a bit easier than it actually is, like getting a builder…) and we felt like they never actually gave us deliberately false information. We felt like we were dealt with honestly, which is more than I can say for the previous two that we dealt with.

I realize that I have still not detailed the deceptive tactics that the real estate agent used in selling us our first house, but I do want to get to that eventually.

This story was actually prompted by a contact that I received from this web-page last month. The person who contacted me is a real estate agent in Townsville who does not work on a percentage commission, but rather on a fixed price for sale. I apologize for taking so long to respond…

In my previous post Young and Naive I wrote a bit about our experience in selling our old house to Castletown Shopping World.

There sure is a lot that I don’t know that I wish I did know about buying and selling a house. A lot of what I wish I knew can be read in the following article: Get Rich Slowly » What I Wish I Knew Then About Home Buying. That article gives a pretty good commentary on another article over at Yahoo Finance: What I Wish I Knew Then About Home Buying.

Like many things in life (like having kids, getting married, etc.) stuff like this can sometimes only really be learned after actually going out and doing it yourself. That said, if you can pick up even just a few pointers from the article it could be helpful.

Sometime soon I want to find the time to write a bit about our experience in purchasing our first house as it was a bit of an eye opener into what people will do to sell a house.

I reckon that this is exactly what the realtor representing Castletown was thinking when we started talking to us about buying our old house (see The Street that Castletown Bought for more details).

In the weekend newspaper they listed some of the houses around Townsville that had been sold for over $500,000 in the last three years (we weren’t on that list). We discovered that our neighbour, who had the exact same land size as us, had sold his house for nearly double what we had sold our for. This was despite the realestate agent trying to convice us up to the last minute that we wouldn’t even get what we wanted for our house.

I am certainly not ungrateful that we have been able to move closer to our friends and work, and that we are able to renovate our new house. It has been an amazing testimony to us of God’s faithfulness. What it does do is leave me with a strong distrust of realestate agents whose motivating factor is only $$$, despite stating otherwise…

Last year is when Tamara and I made the big move and sold our old house to Castletown, The Street that Castletown Bought. In January this year we moved out of the old house and into our new house which has been the subject for the majority of this site. We would still drive past our old empty house every weekend when we went shopping, but this week was a bit different.

Our old house

This week when I drove past our old house it wasn’t there!

Where is it now?

I think that Caleb was a bit confused as well since he knew that was where our old house used to be, but all of a sudden it was gone!

It is the first of the twenty or so houses that Castletown purchased that has been moved or destroyed. It looks like a lot of the other houses have been prepared for removal, but none have gone yet. An article in the weekend paper said that Castletown plans to have the renovations completed by the end of the year, so I guess that they will getting rid of the other houses soon.