A Different View

21 May 2011

It’s funny what a holiday can do. It refreshes the mind, helps you to either put things into perspective or see things from a different perspective.

Our 5 week break away from the block, and in fact from New Zealand, certainly did that.

I left New Zealand wondering how I was going to get through the next 10 years on the block without it breaking me physically and mentally. I arrived back in New Zealand with the realization that it isn’t necessary to give my entire life to this 10 acres. It can have pieces of me, which I shall willingly and happily give but it can no longer have everything.

This is in part thanks to Jay & Bex. Having decided they would like to move to New Zealand to have a similar lifestyle to ours, and quite possibly somewhere reasonably close by, it got Aaron and I thinking and talking.

If all 4 of us pretty much want the same thing, why don’t we buy a large block of land together, build 2 houses and create a shared paradise and possibly a business? 4 pairs of hands working on a project together is vastly different from 1 and sometimes 2 pairs of hands. It’s like 4 to power of 4. Simply put, you can get a lot of shit done vey quickly.

Of course that’s not all, there’s that instant support network, more people to bounce ideas off, the ability to own a bigger block of land than just 2 people can own, more hands on deck in emergency situations, and perhaps best of all, it means each couple can go on holiday knowing the other couple will be there to look after the place and the animals.

So we shared our thoughts with Jay and Bex. Take your time, we said. Think about it, maybe get back to us in a few weeks and tell us what you think. 24 hours later and they had an answer; they were keen.

And so they departed back to Australia for another year and we’ve thrown a business proposition their way and told them to think about all the pros and cons for the next 3 months before they decide if it’s a definite yes.

In the meantime their initial yes has of course meant our long-term plans for the block have had to be revised. We had a 20-year plan when we bought the place and that changed to a 15-20 year plan last year. All of a sudden it has the possibility of being only 7-8 years. It’s a scary proposition.  50% of me is saying so what, life changes, sell and be happy. The other 50% is saying, are you kidding?! All the blood, sweat and tears and you’re prepared to give it up just like that? No f***ing way!

There are of course pros and cons to both sides of the argument and I’m wise enough to know that I will be happy whatever the outcome.

Straight off there are 2 conditions to our selling this block, a) it has to be financially worth it to sell and b) Jay and Bex have to get residency before we even consider putting our house on the market.

And so first things first, I organized for a real estate agent to visit. We told them the truth, we may want to put our property on the market in 12 months time. We asked - What would we get in today’s market and what should we do to make the place as saleable as possible?

We were right on the money as far as beautification of the property but we were in a completely different ball park as far money goes. This in itself isn’t unusual of course, agents and sellers always have different opinions.

Aaron and I had already sat down and worked out what we have invested in the property since we bought it. And we have only taken into account house, shed, drive, fencing and orchard trees. To make it worth the investment of time we have put into it, the bare minimum we would need sell it for is the amount we have invested plus $50K.

The agent gave us an estimated sale value and it was $150K below the minimum we would accept.

Wow!!!

I was completely floored and it took a good half hour to get my head around what the agent was saying.

In all honesty I wasn’t panicked or upset. After all, it’s a bad market at the moment, the market is flooded with rural properties for sale and the economy is stumbling. We don’t want to sell it right now anyway. However, what we hadn’t realized is just how low the market has dropped. It has made both of us realize that there’s a long way for the market to go before we can even get close to what we want for the property. Selling next year is just not going to be a viable option for us.

This doesn’t kill our plans though, it just makes us reassess and reprioritize. For a start, we now know that any further financial investment in the property would be over-capitalisation.

Apart from a bit of fencing and planting that needs to be done around the stream we had already made the decision to stop spending money on infrastructure. Now we have good reason not to get swayed by ideas of new projects. Thoughts of an extra water tank or more orchard trees have been halted in their tracks.

In our 20-year plan, year 1-5 was all about infrastructure, year 6-10 was all about beautification. It is now year 6 and after this little reality check we are definite in our resolve to concentrate solely on beautification from now on.

We have also decided to cut back on the animals; less pigs, cows and sheep will lighten the burden on our time and on the land. We’ll focus now on making the block more self-sufficient and on creating a more manageable, attractive look.

We’ll get the vege garden fully productive, get bee hives, manage the fruit trees we have and pen those ducks in at night so I can sell the duck eggs.

We’ll still look at buying a block of land with Jay and Bex but it may just be that there will only be 1 house built on it initially and that house will be theirs. At this stage it’s looking highly likely that we’re at least 5 years away from being able to sell. And this is probably an optimistic assumption based on economic predictions that the world could be stuck in an economic downturn until close to 2020.

As I said before, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We both like living here, we both like the house and we’re only just starting to really see the fruits of our labours – heritage fruit trees starting to produce well, soil condition improving, and trees we planted starting to mature. Worst case scenario, we’re here for the full 15 – 20 years. In that case we will have lost nothing except for the opportunity to travel down a different path in life.

The Real Estate agent did give as an insight into current market thinking and for that I’m grateful. It seems the 10-acre dream is now the 5-acre dream and currently people are looking for land to create their own dream, rather than buying into someone else’s dream.

These are things we didn’t know and are good to know as far as planning for the future.