What I’ve found over my years is that people underestimate how hard it is to buy their first home. I’m now thirty and at the age where about half my friends are homeowners and the other half are not. Many of my friends went to university, whereas I did an apprenticeship and so I became significantly more financially stable before they did. At twenty-four years old, I went into the market to buy my first home. It was so much harder than I thought it would be.
Being the young tradie that I was, I had no idea of the logistics and legal protocols that went into buying a home. I realised pretty quickly after the initial shock that I needed to employ someone to do the conveyancing. Bentleigh was the suburb I was interested in, and so I chatted with some conveyancers nearby about what purchasing a home really looked like. I realised that it honestly would’ve been easier for me to just build my own home, seeing as I was (and still am) a fully qualified carpenter.
At the time I felt that they made the buying process way more difficult than necessary. How do I feel about it now, you may ask? It’s still more difficult than necessary. There’s so many things that have to be done, or checked or double checked. Everyone acts as if they’re the ones actually building the house. They have no idea how important that stuff actually is.
One of my best friends is looking to buy a house this year and asked for my advice. The number one piece of advice that I could give him is to talk to a property conveyancing solicitor as soon as physically possible. They are without a doubt the people that helped me the most when purchasing my first house. I would never have been able to manage it without them, and so visiting one should be the very first thing my best friend does.