2020 wrap-up #2 - February

Interstate relocation

After many months of talking about an interstate relocation, we finally locked it in and set about making it all happen. While the relocation was initially going to be to Adelaide, for business reasons that did not go ahead, and Brisbane became our new destination.

So where do you start with something like this? Not knowing Brisbane at all we needed to work out where we wanted to live - North, South, East or West?! So very early on we commenced our research and spoke with people, trawled the internet, joined facebook groups and chatted with complete strangers and settled on a few areas that were worth further (on the ground) investigation.

To get our sale underway we interviewed a couple of real estate agents before choosing Jake Battenally from Ray White - he would turn out to be a solid choice and just what we needed to get us through the sale. We signed the real estate agency agreement on 25 January and the house went on the market shortly after that. While originally 'By Negotiation' with a 'soft opening' we eventually went to Auction to get some certainty around the sale (given our Brisbane purchase would be dependent on the Canberra sale). 

Early interest was strong. We had some very early offers - one of which we might have taken as it was ~$10k off what we really would have liked to get (but still over what we needed). However, we stayed strong and continued to Auction where we got a solid price and were able to move forward with the Brisbane purchase.

On 14 February, we flew to Brisbane to do some house-hunting (sans kids). We looked at around 15 properties in North Brisbane and West of Brisbane over three days. This helped us narrow down suburbs and we identified three houses we would possibly put an offer on. We decided to put an offer in on one to test the waters. The negotiation process turned out to be non-existent with the owners being completely unreasonable with their expectations on price, so we pulled out. We then commenced negotiations on another property not far from the first one and this progressed well. After offers, counter-offers and counter-counter-offers we settled on a price with the vendor agreeing to caveat the whole deal on the successful sale of our house at Auction. Now the pressure was on! 

We continued with the weekly open houses - so much fun - and were feeling relatively positive about a strong showing at the auction scheduled for mid-March.

On 18 February we found out Chelle's car had been written off by the insurance company and that they were coming to collect it a few days later. It was a bit of a shock, but not entirely unexpected. This introduced additional stress that we really didn't need at this point in time! But rather than rush out and buy a new car we decided to wait until we got to Brisbane as this would actually make things easier by not having to relocate a second vehicle.

Addi starts pre-school

Addi started pre-school at Gold Creek and settled in very quickly. Unfortunately she didn't spend long there due to COVID-19 and our relocation, but she had fun nonetheless.