It’s a trope of our times that becoming a first-home owner has never been more difficult and, while there are tens of thousands of twentysomethings who can identify with that fact, it’s frankly no easier to buy your first home when you’re zooming in on 70.
Nearly eight months ago, as I explained in November, a new estate agent took over the management of the inner-urban Melbourne apartment where I’ve lived since 2015. Immediately the agent’s sales honcho started pressing for site entrance to perform a valuation, even as he assured me the owners had no intention of selling.
I knew that not only were the days of “peace and enjoyment” promised in my lease gone for good but I was now on that slippery slope, the travelator of uncertainty, taking me in the direction of homelessness, perhaps via the off-ramp of eviction.
How long the descent would be I couldn’t have imagined. In the eight months from September until the end of May, I contacted 29 estate agents; attended 15 inspections (and, being a wheelchair user, I was not surprised to find that at some of them I required the help of fellow “house-hunters” even to make it into the property); spent an estimated $300 in taxi fares to the farthest reaches of Victoria; and squandered hundreds of hours of my life – which I’ll never get back unless reincarnation turns out to be a thing – in online searches.
In the depths of this tunnel, back in April, I was getting desperate for a glimmer of light when one of those online searches yielded an affordable – and, from what I could tell, accessible – unit. Due to a mix-up based on the fact that the property was listed with two different real estate agents (one looking for a renter, the other for a buyer), I managed to “beat the crowd” by being given a private inspection.
The place was indeed accessible but – having already been told by a bank that I was ineligible for a loan of twice as much as this agent was asking – I signed a sale agreement on the iPad line (subject to being able to raise a bank loan) and only that night, on reading the fine print, did potential “buyer’s remorse” set in.
If I couldn’t raise the loan within a week and a half, I saw that I’d incur a $480 debt for nothing. Having never owned a home – over the decades, the money others saved for their shot at the Australian dream had gone into slaking my thirst for travel – I waited a day or two. A broker who knew my circumstances ruefully informed me within 24 hours that I stood little chance of being offered a mortgage; and so I called back the “good agent”, as I think of him, to say I was not going ahead with the deal.
Expecting him to insist I send through the loot to free me of liability, I was amazed when he not only declined to enforce the clause but apologised for maybe having been “too pushy” at the inspection.
This, believe it or not, is a story with a happy ending. And although it concerns the roof over my head, it somehow seems more natural to use travel – leaving home and coming back – as my analogy of choice.
Since last spring it’s as if I have been on a Grand Tour, espying hundreds of locations and new destinations. In the tightest rental market on record, with the added complication of my physical disability – and aided only by my intuition and the sterling legal resource of Victoria’s Justice Connect agency – I have been “round the world” in search of a solution that was ultimately found not far from my front door.
Two weeks ago I moved my household 50 metres – to another one-bedroom flat in the same tower block.
I’ve written three nonfiction books in the past 20 years and now, having discovered for myself that reality is indeed stranger than fiction, perhaps it’s time I turned my attention to that novel I never thought would be in me.
• Ken Haley is a veteran newspaper journalist, author and, since 2012, tutor to journalism students at Swinburne, Monash and Melbourne universities
