email minutiaie - contact with Wayne, the estate agent

I thought it might be amusing for future posterity to look back on the details of what how we came to purchase this place, at least in terms of the "email records". What with us living in the UK, a lot of the discussion took place via email - with the estate agent, with Mum and so forth. So, without further ado, here's the first of a series of transcripts I've unearthed from my old email files.


Dave's first email to the estate agent - 11th Jan 2004

Hi,
This is Dave, from London. I'm using this email instead of dave@ as the server is down at the moment, so could you just use this address for all correspondence, thank you.

I spoke to you earlier about the Lillicur Road property. We had a look at some of the other properties on your website, but like the looks of this particular one the best.

My wife and I are very interested in purchasing the property, and have an appointment to speak to our UK bank tomorrow to arrange financing. This should not be a problem as we have about £200,000 equity in our UK property, which we can borrow against for any purpose.

A couple of further questions which I neglected to ask you when we spoke:

As we are not going to be living in Australia for a few years yet, what do we do with regards to maintenance of the property? e.g. would it be possible to 'rent' the land to a local farmer? could this be arranged through you?

What is the name of the local shire/council? We would like to call them with regards to planning/building permits etc

Is there a landline telephone line adjacent to property, and what is mobile phone reception like there?

How long have the current owners owned the property and why are they selling?

I'm trying to arrange for my parents to have a look at the property. I will ask them to get in touch with you in regards to inspecting the property this week sometime.

Assuming the inspection goes well, we would be in a position to move quickly. Could you tell us what is the process for us to make an offer for the property, bearing in mind we are on opposite ends of the earth and operate on opposite time zones. e.g. would a fax followed by bank transfers be OK for deposits etc?

look forward to hearing from you,
Regards Dave and Lynette


... and this is the reply from the estate agent - 13th Jan 2004

Hi David
I am answering some of your queries as follows:-

Mobile reception is a bit "iffi" -
Local council is Central Gold Fields shire and their telephone number is 5461060.
Power and telephone are available at front of property.

The address of the property is Lilicur Road, Amherst.
My mobile number is .
The rates do not exceed $500.00

Dawn is meeting with me Wednesday for an inspection at the property.
If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me.
Regards Wayne.

Dave's reply putting in an offer - 17th Jan 2004
Note this is less than 1 week after we first found the place!

Hello,
First, apologies for the delay in getting back to you… we had a crisis here in London with our pet rabbit who has been very ill, so were not able to think properly about this until today.

We’ve decided we would like to go ahead with the purchase of the Lillicur Road property, at the asking price of $90,000. After much discussion with my wife’s parents, it seems that there is the potential to realise our dream with it, even though it will be a lot of hard work to get there! At least this will let us take the first step. We’re still interested in finding out how much it would cost to connect to the electricity, but have priced some solar systems as an alternative so our decision to proceed is not subject to the answer on the electricity front.

The only caveat that remains is that our offer is subject to financing approval. We’ve had verbal approval of this already, and are just waiting on getting the paperwork through so we can get it all finalised. It should be straightforward as we’re financing it by taking out a loan against the equity in our London house, and we have more than enough income/equity to support it. Based on the information we’ve given our bank verbally they said there would not be a problem, so I can’t imagine anything going wrong. However, I never feel 100% sure about these things until the money is actually in my bank account, so our offer does need to be subject to financing. The papers from the bank arrived in the mail this morning for us to fill in, so hopefully it shouldn’t be more than a week or two before it is finalised. We will keep you posted.

We’ll try and call you on Sunday morning your time to discuss this further (it’s Saturday here but quite late for you now) and find out what we need to do next regarding deposit, paperwork, etc. Here are our contact details if you need to reach us in the meantime:

David and Lynette