Purchasing a new home is exciting and stressful. For us, that excitement definitely dissipated into various stages of fear, stress and frustration. To put it simply, the real estate agents we were dealing with were a bunch of cowboys. There were a whole heap of promises made as to when we’d get the keys. They were great at communication, at the start, but once they received the payment, it very much became a ‘we’ll call you’ situation. Months went by and all we would get is dead-end dial tones and unresponsive emails.
After a few threats and strongly worded letters from people of importance, we were finally able to move in. We only spent about a week in a new abode before all its flaws started unravelling. We noticed that the heating didn’t work, the hot water never lasted, the gas stove would take ridiculously long to get hot, the power switch would cut out and the stair rail had an obvious wobble. These are all things that we did not pick out at the inspection. It was clear to us that the real estate agent had blatantly lied about the condition of most of the utilities in the home. We tried to contact them to ask them to help pay a Melbourne plumber for hot water repairs. Melbourne gets cold and we thought they’d understand that. Instead, these rude so-and-sos proceeded to tell us that it was no longer their issue as we had bought the property from them.
I couldn’t believe it. We had already spent a whole heap of money on the deposit, but now we were going to be stuffed having to pay all these repair fees. My lovely husband tried to do these repairs himself, but once he climbed onto the roof and saw the state of the gutters, he knew that we needed to book a roof gutter cleaning.
Even when the hot water repairer and the gutter cleaner came over, they were in total shock about the state of the home. Apparently, it’s not the first time they’ve seen this.