I came across an interesting ad on my web-site the other day. Someone was actually using Google AdSense to sell a house.
I think that this is an interesting way to sell a house and I wonder if the person was successful in selling it. There probably wasn’t much use showing it to me, since I am in Townsville, so I really have to wonder if it was a successful campaign or not.
If you have been reading this site for a while you probably would have read about some of the things that we went through while purchasing and then selling our old house. If you haven’t read it here is a link to the article, Young and Naive, I’ll wait until you’ve had a chance to read it…
Okay, now that you are back (or did you ever leave?) I will tell you another story about buying a house, our house.
The company was selling the house that we are currently living in was Coral Sea Properties. They have actually been the company to buy and sell the house the last three times. This seems to indicate to me pretty good service as people have been happy both purchasing and selling their house through them.
The service that we got from Coral Sea Properties was actually quite good. They gave us mostly realistic information (they made some things seem a bit easier than it actually is, like getting a builder…) and we felt like they never actually gave us deliberately false information. We felt like we were dealt with honestly, which is more than I can say for the previous two that we dealt with.
I realize that I have still not detailed the deceptive tactics that the real estate agent used in selling us our first house, but I do want to get to that eventually.
This story was actually prompted by a contact that I received from this web-page last month. The person who contacted me is a real estate agent in Townsville who does not work on a percentage commission, but rather on a fixed price for sale. I apologize for taking so long to respond…
As we have been getting closer to finally knowing what to do with the development of our own house (will tell you more later) my thoughts have sometimes wandered to the back corners of our yard and the tree or cubby house that I want to build for Caleb down the track.
I found what I thought was a pretty good plan from Mitre 10. I wrote about it in a previous article, An Amazing Tree House.
I must admit now that what I had previously thought of as a good tree house is not actually all that impressive. In an article on the New York Magazine web site they have some pretty impressive looking tree houses. They are professionally designed and cost upwards of $100,000 USD! Below is an image from their article and a link to the page:
I must admit that I am impressed, but I don’t think that I will be changing my own plans for Caleb’s own cubby house…
In the beginning of the year I signed up for ADSL2+ for our home. ADSL2+ can theoretically give us 20Mbit download and 1Mbit upload. Up till now we have been using dialup, which is a bit painful.
We got a phone call yesterday telling us that they had finally set-up the telephone exchange to handle ADSL2+ and we could go down and pick-up the modem when we are ready to. I am thinking about doing that before lunch today, but it may need to wait until tomorrow.
We went with a company called Regional Internet Australia, or RAWNET. The have wireless and ADSL2+ packages, both of which are being sold by quite a few re-sellers around Townsville at the moment. The broadband Internet packages have no contract and comes with a free wireless router. The no contract thing could be good because we can leave at any time, but it could also make it real easy for them to up the costs and change the contract if they want to.
The broadband package that we got was only $25.00 per month for 5GB downloads, which is way cheaper than most of the other options available here. We worked it out and we think that it may even be cheaper than dial-up because we have to pay $0.15 for local phone calls here in Australia. If we find that we are needing more than 5GB we can also upgrade to the 20GB package for only an extra $10.00 or so per month.
Now all I need to do is get my deck set-up so that I can sit out their with my laptop and enjoy the speed with wireless. Of course, I’ll also need a laptop that has more than 5-minutes battery life, but that’s another story…
