14 September 2007

Its scary we've got financial approval for our land purchase and home building mortgage. We'll exchange contracts on Monday. The vendor wants settlement over 28 days instead of the usual 41 so lets hope the bank can do things quickly.

We have both Stamp Duty on the land at $6.5k and also a yearly land tax duty of $300.
Fortunately we knew about both. Stamp duty is much reduced because we're first time buyers, but also obviously because its a land purchase.

When the contracts came through we had some last minute questions. When you see stuff in black and white it's amazing what occurs to you. All along we have known they were drainage easements on the land to drain the rear block accross the natural slope of the land to the front - what we didn't think of were whether these drains really had water drains already in them to drain the plot from front to back, or whether this was suddenly going to be part of our site costs which are already high from having being slightly sloping. Anyway its all sorted the drains are there.

I've just this minute booked our next tender meeting with Clarendon Homes in a couple of weeks where we get to sign off on the architectural plan, building contract and tender.