Last housing post of the year
We’ve had a bit of a change in circumstance, such that we expect to be able to buy our own house in the next six months or so. We could, in theory, even do it in a few weeks, but this is important enough to be worth doing carefully.
We’re gradually settling on Sunbury and Werribee as the places we need to be looking first. Both are ~40 minutes by train from the Melbourne CBD, and both have houses and villa units with 2-3 bedrooms within our range reasonably near the station and other facilities.
Sunbury seems to be winning at the moment, as we spent a fair bit of time researching it for rental options a few months ago and there are a lot of two-bedroom villas in the ~$200k area, and a reasonable number of 3-bedroom places if we’re willing to walk up to 1.5km to get to town. There are also 3+ bedroom houses closer in around ~$300k, which is something we could consider moving up to in five to ten years once there’s enough equity in the first property.
But we haven’t visited either yet and it’ll be a while before we’re ready to do more than simply research options. Werribee may well make something of a comeback.
Anything closer in is pretty much unaffordable if you don’t drive, and the eastern-fringe suburbs where we could afford to buy near a station are an hour or more by train. Almost all the new development areas have no real public transport, if you’re lucky you get one bus route that stops at 3PM. Caroline Springs is a prime example: it could be a pretty reasonable place to live if only it had viable public transport!
But a place like Werribee or Sunbury seems to have much of what you need within a few kilometres, so the worst-case scenario is the occasional short-ish taxi ride so long as you get somewhere close enough to shops, station, and school.
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