Did you hear that we’re moving our home office to a warehouse?
It looks like we have found a warehouse.
Check out the video below to find out more!
Now, we saw this one in the early days, back a couple months ago when we were looking around. It was a good location, but the photos on the internet, it was like they didn’t want it to sell because it was the worst photos that you’ve seen. There were just rubbish on benches and dodgy offices. There were containers and old cars. It just looked terrible. So at first we didn’t want to even go and have a look at it. But when we did have a look, even though there was still rubbish in every room, it was a lot bigger than a require and it’s got some pretty good bones to it. And it’s a pretty good site with five different units around.
So Ben and his wife and the office staff came around to have a look and Ben’s wife just hated it. She said it was too dark and dreary and it looked like someone had been living upstairs. So she was just hating on it already. But Ben talked her off the edge and said, “Look, there’s stuff we can do to fix all this.”
The mezzanine looked a bit dodgy as it bounced a little bit. So we asked the property agent if it was council approved. So he went and spoke to the owner and let’s just say his name is Harold. Harold wrote back and said, “Oh yeah, it’s all legit. It’s done by an old Italian mate of mine. And it’s all to code. And he’s used really good beams and all the rest of the stuff.” So we were going to make an offer. It’s got to be subject to finance of course, and also subject to building approval to see if it is up to code because we’d like to get it properly approved through council. And then the other thing was a roof leak out the back too that we’d like them to sort out.
Offer Made, Now What?
A little bit of a weird situation that we’ve got in here. We put an offer for the unit and we hadn’t heard anything for two days from the agent. So we gave him a call and said, “What’s going on? This unit’s been for sale for a while.” (probably because of the pictures that they have on the internet). “We made an offer and now we haven’t heard anything. Do they reject the offer or do they accept the offer or do they give us a counter offer? It’s pretty easy. What’s going on?” And he said, “Oh, I’m not sure. I’ll call up the owner and see what’s going on.” And then he called back and said, “Yeah, the owner’s got to check with his accountant.” And we were like, “Okay, that sounds a bit weird.” We thought he’d know what he wanted to sell it for.
And then the next day the agent called up and said, “We got some bad news for you. The unit has been taken over the bank now.” We were like, “Okay, what does that mean?” He went, “Well, obviously the owner – let’s call him Harold again – wasn’t paying the mortgage. And so the bank’s taken possession of it.”
We said, “Okay, well, what happens to our offer?” And he went, “Well you probably have to forget about it now.” Because what the bank really needs to do when it becomes a mortgaging sale is to put it on auction. They can’t just sell it for whatever they want because the owner might say, “Well, you sold it for 50 grand less than what we could have got in the real market.” So now the warehouse kind of have to go to auction. We were like, “Yeah, all right, well we’ll just keep looking around.” But there was nothing available.
But then he called back the next day and said that the owner Harold was still willing to sell it to me. And we were like, “What, is he still in the picture?” So he was still in the picture. He must owe the bank less than what he’s going to get for. Weird situation. But the only thing was that now the bank said we had to remove all conditions like the council approval and subject to getting a structural engineer to check out the mezzanine.” And we said we’re not going to get rid of the subject of finance because you’d never know what the bank’s going to do, especially with self-employed people with four dependants. They make it really difficult. But we’re happy to get rid of the building inspection and the council approval and take about 10 grand off. So we submitted the offer again.
It looks like we’ll get approval. There’s not much around at the market and this is a really good location for us. It gives us room to grow a little bit more if we need to. So now we just got to sit back and hope the mezzanine’s not too bad. And the roof leak we can fix. But anyway, we’ll just have to see how it pans out.
