Hi Everyone,
My name is Dave, only just got told about this website from a mate last week, I've already read alot of posts and there is some great information here and ideas.
Here is my story:
I just got married in mid January and now we're starting to look for a house, we started out by looking at some established houses as we're first home buyers. We were also interested in possibly a house and land package as we're currently renting and didn't think we could afford to build a house.
Established houses were just terrible for what they were asking, we then looked at a couple of brand new townhouse options in Kalina, Beaumont Estate and also Acacia Gardens, all looked very nice but then as we were searching for houses on realestate.com.au we saw brand new house and land packages in The Ponds for a similar price if not cheaper.
My first impression of The Ponds was, it looks great, will be really nice, can see alot of potential for growth in property in the future but one important thing for me (being a bit of a nerd) was the internet connection. I currently live in Parklea and am with TPG but unfortunately am about 4kms away from the exchange so don't get ADSL 2+, only ADSL 2, so I did a search on the TPG website for their coverage plan and it showed The Ponds off the Quakers Hill exchange and at over 4.5kms I did not want an ADSL connection there. The company I work for has a sister company that does fibre to the home and I was eager to find out if they'd gotten into The Ponds, unfortunately an agreement wasn't met and I was in a dilema... I asked around and couldn't find any concrete information on what was at The Ponds, a mate of mine then sent me a link to this site where I found out there is no fibre here just ADSL, BUT the good news was that its coming off the Kellyville exchange which is alot closer.
So question 1 is anybody in The Ponds area on ADSL 2+ and what sort of connections speeds you guys getting? I'm a heavy downloader so I'd like to have a decent connection.
So once I was happy finding that information out I did a bit more searching around on the net for house and land packages, found a good deal with Package Central who work along side Allworth Homes so I've set up a 2nd meeting to find out more details. Our initial visit with them last week seemed very promising, I was originally wanting to buy something off the plan as settlement would be when we received the keys (as I'm renting at the moment), but the guy there explained that if you're prepared for a little pain you can have a lot of gain. What he meant by that is instead of buying a house and land package off the plan where you don't pay anything till settlement (which you pay a premium price for), they sell house and land but you choose your land, start paying interest only repayments on the land price, make a couple of progress repayments and then move in. He broke it down on a 9 month scale and asked how much we were saving per month and it was in our budget, so I was very happy to find that out. So this means that we can get a bigger block of land, a good sized house (not a townhouse) for a cheaper price than the townhouse estates we'd been looking at and its going to grow in value more than what a townhouse will. Hunting around the forums here doing searches on Allworth Homes has come back very positive and also on The Ponds to find out some of the extra information on the new suburb.
As we haven't chosen land or a house design we like yet we've got alot to look forward to and alot to think about. I was emailed the new land release for The Ponds for this weekend and thought I'd go down last night and try and get an idea of what the land is like. Its mostly fenced off so we decided to walk down to the sales office - to my shock I saw 4 cars and a tent already waiting there, had a chat to the security guard and got up to speed on things people do to secure the land, they're camping out waiting in line until 10am Saturday when the office opens...
My second question is with all the land now being released on the western side of The Second Ponds Creek will internet speed drop much than being on the eastern side of the creek?
Does anybody have any ideas of when other land releases are going to be? as we may miss out on this land release, the ideal land that I'd like would be 3rd block back in the middle on the western side with a block land facing east - west. We only have a budget of around $500k for house and land though as it is our first house and I much prefer a single level instead of double story so we'll see what happens...
Some other questions:
- anybody got any feedback about Package Central?
- whats the difference between going through Package Central and buying my land myself and going directly to Allworth and choosing a house I like?
- any feedback on Allworth Homes, I've read a fair bit on them and they seem pretty good value for money and do a good job..
- I'm going through RAMS for my home loan and I didn't have a solicitor so I asked can you recommend one and they did - they're price is $1200 is that about the going rate?
Well thats all I can think of for now, I'm sure I'll have more questions as time goes on.
Thanks for reading and any replys - some of you might be my new neighbours
Dave.