The messy bit between finding a house and owning it.

What buying a property actually looks like, warts and all.

The building and pest report lands.

There’s an issue the buyer wasn’t expecting, and it’s been classified as a major structural defect.

It’s not what anyone wants to hear and a decent way to ruin everyone’s afternoon.

So the scramble begins. What do we do now? What does this actually mean? Who’s responsible for what happens next? Who’s going to wear the cost?

The inspector can explain what they found. The settlement agent can explain what the contract allows.

All useful.

But none of them can answer the question the buyer actually has:

Knowing this now, do we still buy the house?

This is the part of buying property that doesn’t make the Facebook feed. Everyone sees the smiling photo with the SOLD sign. Nobody sees the chaos that came before it.

But let’s rewind

Most buyers start with a mortgage broker.

They get a borrowing capacity number, get excited and immediately start flicking through the shiny listings online which are, of course, at the top of their budget!

Then comes the “We’re just seeing what’s out there.” stage.

Fair enough- "got to sample the market" right?!

Thats all well and good until that goes on for months, meanwhile, prices keep moving and the clock on the pre-approval keeps ticking.

What a lot of buyers don’t realise is that pre-approval is not a commitment to lend and is generally only valid for three to six months.

Then they finally find “the one”.

Great.

Except borrowing capacity still doesn’t answer another fairly important question:

Is this property actually worth buying at this price?

You can be comfortably within budget and still be looking at the wrong property, the wrong street or the wrong price.

The bank is not there to make that call.

Neither is the person selling it to you.

Different jobs, one buyer

Once you actually start trying to buy your dream house, more people enter the chat.

A broker’s job is the finance.

A settlement agent manages the settlement process, paperwork and relevant contract conditions.

An inspector reports on the physical condition of the property.

A selling agent represents the seller.

They are different jobs because they require different expertise.

Each person can give a perfectly correct answer to the question they were asked while the buyer is sitting there thinking, Okay, but what does this mean for the house I’m about to buy?

The system largely assumes the buyer will connect those dots themselves.

The selling agent was never neutral

A selling agent acts for the seller.

That’s pretty obvious, yet buyers forget it all the time because the selling agent is also the person answering questions, arranging access and guiding them through the offer process.

A good selling agent can be transparent, professional and genuinely helpful.

Helpful is not the same as being on your side.

Their job is to represent the seller’s interests. That’s not them being “dodgy” (I know selling agents get a bad rap sometimes, but c’mon guys - it’s literally just them doing their job! And be honest - if the shoe was on the other foot when the time comes to selling your property - you’d absolutely expect the same).

Back to that building report

We’ve recently seen this play out IRL.

The building report came back with a major structural defect.

If you only read those three words, walking away sounds pretty sensible.

But “major structural defect” is a classification. It is not a decision.

So we needed to understand what it actually meant.

How serious was it? What would fixing it involve? Who was responsible? What might it cost? Did it change the property, the numbers or the reason the buyers wanted it in the first place?

The inspector could explain the defect. The conveyancer could explain the contract position. Further investigation helped put some boundaries around the likely work and cost.

Then we had to decide what all of it meant for the buyers and the purchase.

Once the pieces were together, the issue looked different.

In this case, the buyers still wanted the property. They understood the issue and the risk, and at the end of the day, the numbers still stacked in their favour.

We’d seen this particular defect before and knew it was a relatively straightforward and affordable fix, so we decided to absorb the cost and the worry and get it taken care of.

Crisis averted. Everyone cools their jets and the march to settlement continued.

Had the investigation shown something that fundamentally changed the property, cost or risk, walking away would have made sense.

It didn’t.

The report wasn’t ignored. It just wasn’t allowed to make the decision by itself.

Not every problem needs to become World War III

Property has a strange ability to make small things feel bigger than Ben-Hur.

A repair hasn’t been completed exactly as expected. An inclusion is missing. Somebody disagrees about who should pay for something.

Suddenly a few hundred dollars has become a matter of honour in a transaction worth a million bucks!

Sometimes the principle genuinely matters. Sometimes it doesn’t.

We’ve had situations where the sensible thing was simply to absorb a relatively small cost and move on.

Not because the buyer was wrong or the seller had “won”.

Because if you still want the house, the issue is manageable and the cost is just peanuts in comparison to the whole purchase, blowing everything up to prove you were technically right is not always the brilliant victory it feels like in the moment.

Sometimes the seller needs to compromise. Sometimes the buyer does. Sometimes somebody absolutely should dig their heels in.

The judgement is knowing which situation you are in.

People fill in the blanks

A buyer and seller can cooperate on a transaction worth a million dollars without ever speaking to each other.

Wild when you think about it.

So when something goes wrong - everyone starts filling in the blanks.

The buyer asks for a repair.

The seller hears: "Here we go. Now they’re trying to squeeze us for more!"

The seller pushes back.

The buyer hears: "They knew this was a problem and now they’re trying to dump it on us!"

Maybe.

Or maybe both stories are just that: stories.

Maybe the buyers have stretched every dollar they have and genuinely cannot afford an unknown repair immediately after settlement.

Maybe the seller has already spent thousands fixing other items and genuinely believes they’ve been reasonable.

Neither person needs to be the "bad guy".

Some people are jerks. I’m not going to sugar-coat it. We all know the type.

But I think we give bad intent far too much credit when, in reality, most people are just trying not to get taken advantage of.

That doesn’t mean buyers and sellers all need to hold hands and sing kumbaya together.

It just means human context matters.

Meanwhile, the purchase keeps moving

The reality is, these problems rarely arrive neatly on their own.

Finance is still moving. Deadlines are approaching. Documents are arriving. Strata information turns up. Another inspection is needed. Something that was supposed to be fixed hasn’t been.

Then you get to final inspection, everyone is tired, settlement is two days away and some random item that nobody cared about three weeks ago has suddenly become the hill everyone wants to die on.

Experience doesn’t stop shit hitting the fan.

It helps work out which things genuinely change the case for buying and which ones need to be investigated, negotiated, fixed or let go.

The second job nobody mentions

The buyer should own the final decision.

It is their money, their property and their risk.

But without help, they can also become the default person responsible for everything feeding into it.

A building issue affects the contract. A valuation affects finance. Strata information changes how a defect is understood. A seller’s response changes what needs to happen next.

Then another email arrives.

Who do we need to tell about this? What does it change? Who’s responsible for what happens next?

It’s hard enough for us to keep track of all the moving parts, and we deal with this stuff every day.

Yet the buyer is expected to make sense of all of it.

That is the second job nobody mentions when you buy a house.

You’re being handed specialist advice, contract deadlines, new information, competing interests, and a bunch of unexpected problems coming at you from every direction.

Then somebody needs an answer:

Do we still buy this house?

And that my friends, is what buying a property actually looks like.

Warts and all.