From Search to Success: Michael & Bernie’s Home Buying Adventure

We wanted a large family home in the Rozelle / Balmain area. We wanted a modern kitchen and entertaining area, or at least a place we could create one through renovation, but we didn’t know anything about costs or possibilities with renovations.
We knew it would take a while to find a match for our search, and we knew there might be some properties sold off market. We didn’t want to bid at auction ourselves. And we were worried that in our inexperience we might miss important details during our evaluations.

Kevin was quickly able to establish our requirements and give us an estimated time frame for our search, and then highlight properties that matched them, including letting us know about properties not yet on the market.
He was able to advise us what created or added value to properties, and how hard certain types of modifications would be to make. He was able to point out positive or negative points about properties.
Kevin did a mix of inspecting properties himself and walking through the properties with us. And for the properties we were interested in, stayed in close contact with selling agents, making us much better informed than we would have been if we were navigating the process on our own.

We found a number of promising properties – one very early in our search that was mostly a match, but we all thought we could do slightly better, an off-market property we liked that unfortunately never came to market, and one that we expected to go a bit beyond our price range at auction, and it did (Kevin bid for us).
Then we saw a place that would require a more substantial renovation to meet our needs than what we’d previously considered, but we liked it enough to consider it. Kevin sat down with us and helped us understand what a larger project would look like and was able to connect us to an architect to do a pre-purchase walkthrough to confirm potential feasibility and budget. We never would have bought it without this.
With the experience we’d had, we calculated the price it was worth to us, and Kevin was able to win it on Auction day – a fast and aggressive auction where he saved us from paying anything more over the other buyer’s limit than necessary.

Having someone on our side during the search made the search less stressful and more enjoyable, and it was great to be able to communicate with Kevin through casual chats.
We felt informed about both the market and about the level of interest and likely process for the properties we were specifically interested in.
Having Kevin represent us at Auction was great, he was much better at thinking on his feet than I would have been.

It’s a big purchase but we’re very happy with our choice and have never looked back!