Thread by @erinrileyau

So Matt and I bought some land yesterday (actual contract exchange is in a couple of weeks), and I had no idea how absurd the process was, so let me tell you.

For starters, the land is in Menangle, about 10 minutes from where my parents bought in 2014. We paid about the same- them for 5 acres with a shed with an apartment on it, us for a 500sqm block. That's how much the market has changed out this way

Menangle is about 70kms from the Sydney CBD. It's on a train line, but the trains are not yet electrified, so you get a train to Campbelltown and change. They are also pretty infrequent.

There are two new land developments in the area. One at Menangle Park will have 5000 houses. The second, in Menangle itself, will have 97 in stage 1, then about another 300 in later stages (though those will be on the other side of the train lines)

We decided we'd like to buy in the Menangle development. 29 blocks were part of the stage 1 release, but 5 went to Mirvac staff, so there were only 23 to choose from. About 10 days ago, we got online and had to submit our request for an appointment at exactly 6pm.

I couldn't get on the site, but Matt could. We got an appointment. They were fully booked within a minute. On Tuesday, we found out that we had the 11:45 appointment, which meant that we were 15th.

The process was basically that you show up at your appointment time and you can pick from what's left. We poured over the plans (Matt got out all the DA docs and studied them, like the ex-draftsman he is). I identified potential house designs for each block

In the end, we had a list of 11 we would have bought. If none were available, we were ready to walk away.

So we show up a bit early yesterday, and the whole thing is a little extra. There's a barista making coffees, a spread of pastries from The Store at Menangle (which is adorable, btw). And there's a big board with all the properties and sold signs on the ones that are gone

We walk over to it and 3 of our top 4 are still available. There's still one person ahead of us, but we then know we'll be able to get one of the ones we really liked. They call us in a bit early and incredibly, our first choice was still available.

So it worked out very well for us, but the fact that appointments to buy an unknown, not overly large block of land 70kms from Sydney booked out in under a minute should terrify us all. This is utterly unsustainable.

Oh, and the land won't actually register until Q1 next year, so this is all for the opportunity to be in a house by the end of 2022, at the earliest.