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This blog explains how buying, building or renting a house works in Australia. It makes an interesting reading for newbies and outsiders, expats and newcomers, basically anyone who is not familiar with Australian real estate market.

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I must admit, reading this article about council property valuations totally shocked me. Apparently anyone who thinks that the local council valuates every single property in their area is wrong. I knew that council’s valuations are made once every two years (and therefore the numbers won’t stay accurate for much longer) but had no idea that they take another “shortcut”.

According to Greville Pabst (CEO and Director of WBP Property group), council has all of the properties classified (by building size, land size, etc). Instead of valuating every property they take sales data of 3 months before and 3 months after the valuation date, analyze it, and see how much property of certain type went up in price since the last valuation. Then they apply this value to work out how much they need to add to the previously recorded value. Only 10% of the properties are actually inspected and re-valuated in every municipality – not much, ha?

Anyway, that doesn’t mean that we should disregard council valuations – just take it with a grain of salt.

Statistically speaking, termites are the third thing people fear the most after rising damp and cracking. To understand what the fuss is all about I did some research about them and found pretty interesting things.

In Australia one in every three houses has them. They like moisture; live and move under ground so that makes them hard to be spotted. When they attack a house, all of the wood gets eaten away with only a thin shell left. In this case nobody notices anything until someone’s leg goes through the paper-thin floor.

There are many “tools” specialists use to discover termites: special device that runs on skirting boards and finds the hollow ones by the difference in the sound, a moisture meter (termites make the moister level go up), termite radar, specially trained dogs, etc.

Renovation costs are one of the main things you must consider before buying a house. So I was doing my “homework”, trying to calculate how much renovation would cost me for a house I was thinking of purchasing. I was having a pretty hard time there, because there is no calculator or any other tool that lets you do the math quickly and easily (well, there are some made for US, but nothing for Australia).

Luckily, I found this great website called Archicentre, where you can sign up and get the latest 2008 Building and Renovation Cost Guide emailed to you, accompanied by “21 Tips Inspecting A House for Sale”. They also offer a free e-book, “House Hunt e-book”, compact and useful piece of information.

Everyone knows that the housing prices are sky-high and that it takes about 8 months in average for a prospective home-buyer to become a home-owner. So it is really tempting, when you finally see a property you can afford, to just say “ok, so it needs a little work, I can fix this and that and finally I will have a home to live in”. But I can tell you this much – after looking through the costs in the renovation guide, I don’t think that my house was such a bargain :).