House-hunting

We spent the last week looking around the suburbs for houses.

Went over to Upwey on Monday to look at some hill homes. The people are indeed very friendly and the place is beautiful, but owning a hill home seems to be a lot of work - lots of risk of bush-fires in the summer, and the yards are quite hard to maintain with all the falling leaves!

In the meanwhile, the temporary accomodation on Lonsdale Street was turning out to be too expensive, so we've been looking at other short-term rental options. Decided on a place in Brunswick which isn't cheap, but very convenient.

While Smitha went over to Brunswick to sort out the rental, I headed down to Frankston on Tuesday. We've been talking to some agents by email about interesting houses here - and we had an appointment with one of the agents. This place is quite beautiful and I think this is the better option compared to Upwey.

Came back to Frankston all this week - looked at over a dozen homes! The agents are quite friendly and the market is a buyer's market but not really desperate to sell. We were able to find a few homes we liked and we took time every evening to stack-rank the houses we had seen.

Here's a rainbow we caught from the car of one of the real-estate agents as they ferried us around the houses.

On Saturday, Marcus came along with us to Frankston to check out some of the open houses. We put an offer in on one of the houses we liked most.

This morning we found out that the house we had put an offer on had counter-signed the offer. Before negotiating, we decided we'd put an offer in on another house in the same neighbourhood. Called up the agent and put in the offer.

We just found out that the offer on the second home was bested by someone else - by a sliver. I guess this means we aren't going to get either of these houses. We really liked the second home...