Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Buying a house in Australia’ Category

We now have another Australian citizen as our second little guy got his citizenship approved just three days after the first little guy. That was way back on June 16th and we’ve heard nothing more since, though I guess the next thing we would hear would be the visa grant email as they don’t do any progress updates in the process.

The global timescale is currently saying 20 months which would take us up to the end of 2027. However, that’s the global timescale and we’re applying from the UK which is classed as a low risk country and therefore applications from here supposedly motor on somewhat faster. For instance, we had expected that the little guys’ citizenships would take about four months so would turn up around August but they arrived a couple of months early. We’re expecting that the visa grant will turn up in around six months (i.e. around October), but perhaps August is possible, although anytime in 2026 would be fine, into 2027 not so much.

One promising note is that, because the backlogs on the Partner Visa that we’re applying for has gotten totally out of hand, Immigration Australia have allocated a lot more people to get that backlog down. However, they’re initially concentrating on the older cases and those which are more complex, neither of which applies to us. In fact, we think our case is about as simple as it could be: couple who’ve been together for over twenty years, with two kids who are now Australian citizens, and all (we think) fully documented.

We’ve been keeping an eye on the Australian housing market and it looks like the best time for us to move would be late 2027. However, there are things that we need done with the dogs about nine months before the move, so an December move means that we need to start on the moving tasks around March 2027, although the pace of the move wouldn’t really pick up until the final three or four months as it’s mainly planning things towards the start.

Although the pace wouldn’t really pick up until around summer 2027 (assuming that we get the visa at some stage in 2026), there are things that we can be doing early on and therefore I’m hoping to go part-time in work from September to chip away at those early stages. Whether or not they’ll approve that is a different matter, but if not, the plan is that I leave late 2026 and get going on the moving tasks a bit more intensively.

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We were sure that we had uploaded all of our documents back on April 14th, and in fact we had. What we hadn’t allowed for was that we’d scanned the passports as soon as they’d turned up years ago and in particular before we’d signed them. So June 9th, we got a request from the immigration people for ID documents with photos and signatures i.e. the signed passports. So the dreaded Further Consideration message appeared on the two citizenship applications.

We re-scanned the passports and uploaded them the same day for the two citizenship applications and my visa application and thought that had knocked us back somewhat. So, we were rather surprised to see the Approval of citizenship email from immigration yesterday. Only one of them thus far, but just under nine weeks from application is well before the mid-August date we’d been expecting.

It’s shaping up to be a busy month as Wendy’s British citizenship was approved at the start of June and she’s to go to her citizenship ceremony at the end of July. She’s not British until she goes to that as that’s the day they hand her the citizenship certificate which we can use to get her passport.

On other fronts, we’re working through our timeline with this edging into the period when we start sorting out the UK finances. Most people seem to get the urge to tidy up their UK finances by closing all/most of their UK bank accounts whilst we’re doing the opposite. For a start, chances are that you will still have some requirement for a UK bank account and you will have problems trying to open any after you leave. In principle, you could go with one but it’s always useful to have a backup. Our main ones will be HSBC and Nationwide which both let you retain your accounts after you’ve emigrated. In both cases, it’s useful to have both the current account and a savings account (not an ISA as you can’t pay into that after you leave). Lloyds and NatWest are also possible, but they may change you to their international account after you’ve left the UK. You’ll also want Wise which operates in Australia and can provide you with the Australian equivalent of a sort code and account number as well as the UK ones and let’s you transfer between pounds and Australian dollars fairly cheaply. Last, but not least, you’ll want a UK American Express card because having that at least six months before you leave will let you get an Australian one as soon as you turn up there and that’s the only Australian credit card you’re pretty much guaranteed to get at the start.

Next up should be the second son’s citizenship. We’d thought they would have turned up at the same time, but our eldest got his just before the immigration site shut down for its weekend maintenance so, all being well, the second son will get his during the coming week. I’m thinking that my visa might be approved during the week as we’d deliberately put all the applications in my account on the assumption that if the immigration person saw the others, they’d go ahead and approve them all.

I’ve started looking into the option of a Self Managed Super Fund (SMSF), the much more expensive Australian equivalent of a UK Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPP). And it is a lot more expensive: the £120/year that the SIPP costs will be more like A$4000 (£2000) a year for the SMSF. In fact, it’s so much more expensive and there are so many restrictions on transferring from the SIPP to the SMSF, that I’m going to need to do more complete calculations to see if it would be worth doing at all.

We’ve also continued to look at potential houses, though we definitely won’t be buying anything until I’ve got the visa and not until well into 2027 at the earliest anyway as there’s just too many things left to do on the timeline to move any earlier. Quite a nice range of houses fitting our criteria have come onto the market over the past few months. Surprisingly, some very strong candidates still haven’t sold after maybe four or five months.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

This started out reasonably easy but the family have been adding requirements as the months have gone by, some directly from our experiences on our scouting trip a few months ago and some as we’ve collectively looked at properties online and thought some more about what we each need.

The basic requirement are for a house with three or more bedrooms, a few hectares of land, and costing up to A$1,000,000 (about £500,000). Prices will have changed by the time we’re actually moving, but we’re currently using that as a ball-park in our searches.

Location is always important and we’ve two slightly conflicting requirements with this because Wendy and I will essentially be retiring but the boys will be wanting jobs. Therefore it can’t be too far away from employment centres and in that respect we’re thinking of at most 30 minutes drive from either Launceston or Hobart. We all prefer Launceston but most properties in the recent searches are near Hobart.

As in our move to France, we’ll likely turn up with a massive load of stuff in boxes and therefore we want somewhere that we can store it all. That seems not to be an issue as almost all of the properties turning up in our searches come with assorted store rooms and even buildings.

Although three bedrooms is our minimum requirement, many of the properties that we’ve looked at come with four and a couple of bathrooms which is handy as that second bathroom was added as a requirement to avoid the morning rush.

Heating-wise, the houses generally come with “reverse-cycle airconditioning” (heat pumps) and many with log stoves. In a number of instances, the logs would be supplied by chopping down trees on the property itself. Quite a lot of the houses come with solar panels and in some cases enough to run everything, at least during the day (batteries are prohibitively expensive).

Recently, it has come to our attention that internet access isn’t a given in Australia so we’re specifically looking for that now (it’s called NBN there and comes in the usual cable, fibre, and satellite versions). On a related note, it turns out that TV also isn’t a given and some places that are well within our 30 minute range don’t have much, if any, TV reception (you can check this out at Digitalready). This isn’t a showstopper as there’s a subsidised satellite service (VAST) available in those areas, but something to consider. Incidentally, our French approach of just bringing the Sky box along won’t work as the Sky satellite doesn’t point anywhere near Australia so no FreeSat either. Other things that won’t work either are the various UK terrestrial channels via internet as they are region locked to the UK, although a VPN might get around that. On the TV front, we found that Australian terrestrial TV is almost entirely dire and has the feel of just a whole lot of shopping channels (even Wendy agrees with the dire verdict and she’s Australian!).

I’d also like a study/library which doesn’t seem to be an issue as most of the properties we’ve looked at come with a whole range of rooms outside the usual bedroom, living, kitchen, and bathroom categories.

Sounds daft, but in addition to the normal kitchen, it’s been suggested that a kind of ensuite kitchen for the various non-standard kitchen items would be handy (for the air fryer, popcorn machine, blender, etc.). That said, most of the kitchens are much larger than what we’re used to so this isn’t likely to be an issue. Junior #2 suggested a walk-in pantry as we’d be living “in the wilds” which sounds handy and we’d one in France, but we’re probably not going to be living “in the wilds” as such.

There’s also been some requests for things like space for chickens, vegetable garden, and similar but since we’re looking for a minimum of two hectares (four acres in old money), that doesn’t look like it’ll be an issue.

The water supply isn’t something we’d initially given much thought to. Turns out that most of the properties we’ve looked at are on town water. A little further out is tank water which means you’ve a big tank that the local authority fills up for you now and again for a fee. If you’re on tank water, I imagine that you’re also on a sceptic tank which they can pump out too, though you shouldn’t need them to do that if you’ve sized it properly.

We’ve been getting grocery deliveries for a few years now and that service is available from, mainly, Coles and Woolworths in Australia so long as you’re within their service distance (about 20/30 minutes drive from the nearest store). You can check out availability for that by popping in the postcode of the property that you’re looking at. Again, not a show stopper, but nice to know if it’s available before you move.

And that lot is after just a few months of taking the move seriously! I’m sure there’ll be more requirements arising over the time running up to 2027.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

OK, so we’re intending to move to Australia, but where?

Location is something that we’ve thought about a fair bit. As in our move to France, we want somewhere that has a “bumpy” landscape. Bumpy doesn’t mean mountainous, but rather not boringly flat i.e. some hills, but probably not actual mountains or at least not mountains that we need to cross regularly.

We also want it to be not too far from water which could mean near a river, lake, or even the sea. One key think that we found in France is that if you’re more than about a 90 minute drive from the sea then you have a continental climate which, in France, meant very hot summers and very cold winters, whereas within that 90 minute range the weather was quite reasonable all year. Although Australian climates can be quite different, Tasmania is fairly similar to France so that 90 minute or so distance will similarly change the climate: it snows in Tasmania, but mostly in places more than 90 minutes from the sea.

Together, the above still leave Launceston and Hobart in the frame as they’re both in reasonably bumpy landscapes and less than 90 minutes from the sea.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

The first thing to note is that Australia is big, really big. Not only is there different geography including the usual city, coastal, countryside, and mountains but there’s entirely different climates to consider too. So, for example, if you’re looking up north around Darwin you can have monsoons, around Alice Springs you’ve got major heat in the summer, and in Tasmania you’ve basically got a normal (for UK people) climate. Hence, we’re concentrating our search in Tasmania.

In addition to a temperate climate, Tasmania has a whole lot fewer people: the population density is around 1/20th of what I’m used to locally. That different population density obviously affects the traffic density too which is obvious to me now but confused me initially. One consequence of that lower traffic density is that you can expand the radius that you’re considering for a property. In my initial searches, I used distance as the decider but it turns out that you can drive a whole lot further in twenty minutes in Tasmania than you can in twenty minutes in Belfast.

Unless you’re planning on living in the wilds (of which there’s a lot in Tasmania), there’s essentially two major population centres: Launceston and Hobart. Hobart is the capital and we found that there’s a lot more traffic there than there is in Launceston, as you’d expect from the larger population (about 200,000 vs 80,000). This is also reflected in the house prices: something that would sell for around A$700,000 in Launceston is more like A$1,000,000 in Hobart. That said, if you drive just ten minutes further out of the centre, an equivalent Hobart property is down to A$800,000 or so: it surprised me no end how much the prices changed if you added an extra ten minutes distance.

So, what are we looking for? Well, we have two slightly conflicting objectives in that Wendy and I will be retiring, whereas the boys will be looking for work, which means that we can’t be too far from their employment, hence our searches are looking for somewhere within about 30 minutes drive of either Launceston or Hobart. We’d also like somewhere with “a bit” of land so, notionally, minimum of a couple of acres, but not loads of acres, although we’ve found that isn’t as cut and dried as it first appeared as, for example, 100 acres of forest is probably easier to look after than 2 acres of landscaped garden. We’re not moving for about two to three years, so the prices will obviously have changed over that time but we’re using as a rough guideline A$800,000 as our maximum. Interestingly, when we were looking up to April, we seemed to need that A$800,000 but looking in July we found a number of suitable properties around A$600,000. Other than that, we’re just looking for three bedrooms minimum but even that’s not so clear-cut as you’d expect as Australian homes come with the usual bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms that you’d expect but also things labelled “study” (which could equally be a bedroom), rumpus rooms, entertainment rooms, workshops, storerooms, and a whole host of other categories, many of which I’ve never heard of.

They have open viewings in Australia so we were able to visit several properties whilst we were there (you can search for these via https://www.realestate.com.au/buy/inspection-times-1; they appear up to a week or so ahead). One thing that was clear right away was that the estate agent descriptions were very accurate, but equally clear was that we also needed to know more about the surrounding area of the property that we’d be buying. To partially get around that, you can use satellite view and street view on google maps, which we were doing, but it’s a lot clearer when you’re driving up to the property and having a look around. For example, one property we went to see was just hemmed in between two others and the back garden was pretty much a sheer drop, neither of which were obvious from our online investigations. Equally though, another property has what’s essentially a small national forest in its back garden which was beautiful but not at all obvious from the estate agent description or photos: in fact that property was one we’d buy if this were two years from now, yet, ironically not one that we’d have looked at buying.

What we’ve been mainly using to do our searches is https://www.realestate.com.au (that link takes you directly to one of our searches). There’s also https://www.domain.com.au/ but we found that the facilities on it weren’t so good. The RealEstate site lets you add filters, the key ones for us being the number of bedrooms, maximum price, and minimum land. You’re best to look for one less bedroom than you think you need as it will include houses with other types of rooms that you could just as easily use as a bedroom, so we actually would like four but search for three. House type is “interesting” as it’s, of course, Australian style so you’ve the usual house, townhouse, villa, retirement living, and apartment, but also acreage, rural and land which can all include houses on them. There’s also a map search option which we’ve found to be very useful as you don’t need to know what postcode areas you want your property to be in. Once we’d done a bunch of searches, we noticed that one particular estate agent seemed to turn up in a fair number of them: Neil Hawkins and, funnily enough, he was at one of the properties that we went to visit too! I suspect that’s a common occurrence in that a particular estate agent will likely specialise in the properties that you like yourself. I’m not 100% sure that we’ll end up buying our property via Neil, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up doing that.

We thought at the outset that a scouting trip was essential, and it did indeed prove to be very useful. Whilst most people doing that kind of thing stay in a hotel and then just scoot around the areas that they’re interested in, we chose a self-catering property in an area that we’d previously been looking at for properties. That gave us the opportunity to get a feel for what it might be like living there and the boys pointed out later that it felt like we were living there. For Tasmania, that was Cherry Top Farmstay which is on the edge of Lilydale. It turns out that Lilydale did indeed feel like the kind of village which we’d want to be close to (we don’t want to be in a village though) as it has all the services you need i.e. decent supermarket, post office, medical centre, a small group of takeaways, coffee shops, a tavern, a petrol station, a school, and even a swimming pool. We were there for almost two weeks and were able to cover just about all the things we were aiming to do so we checked out how to sign up for Medicare, change the driving licence over, and saw round a number of other areas that we’d been considering. That said, there were a bunch of things that we couldn’t fit into the time available and we’d have needed at least another week. We’d also have liked more time to explore round Hobart as the two days didn’t really cut it, although it did highlight some negatives (the traffic) and positives (Cygnet). Our trip also had the advantage of highlighting some things that we particularly liked such as the small village feel of Lilydale and put us off Sidmouth a bit as it doesn’t seem to have that, although on paper it seems to.

As I say, we’re aiming to move around 2027 or so but we’re going to continue to look now and again as we build our evidence for my visa application that, all being well, we’ll be submitting late 2026.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.