How to Buy a House

Buying a house online through Abodable makes the homebuying process much easier.

“I want to buy a house. I’m going to buy a house!” ”... Wait, how do I buy a house? Where do I even start?”

Key Takeaways:

Yep. We get it, buying a house is daunting; especially if it’s your first time, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, because we deal exclusively with new property, we’ve streamlined it into a process you can do online, which we’ll cover below. Have a chat with a broker, and once you’ve found a property you’re interested in, it really comes down to four steps:

1. Complete an Expression of Interest (EOI) for the property you’ve found.

- After this, you’ll be sent the contract(s) for the property.

2. Sign the Abodable Buyer’s Agreement form, then upload the build contract (and the land contract if you’re buying a standalone house).

- Depending on your contract, you’ll have a finance period, typically 7-28 days.

3. Upload your letter of financial approval from a financial institute.

4. Pay your deposit, then upload a receipt and a document showing any other conditions of the contract(s) have been satisfied.

There are some preliminary steps that help you to get acquainted with the process. The first part here is to chat to a mortgage broker. This is a free, no pressure meeting where you look at your income and savings, and then look at what banks are willing to loan. It can also help if you have some properties you’re interested in, with some prices to determine if you might be eligible to buy with a bank loan.

Once you’ve met with a broker, you should have a better idea of where you sit financially and what price range you’re sitting in. From here you can find a home with Abodable.

Either way, once you’ve found a property, you can start the first step of the buy-online process.

Step 1

When viewing any property on our site, you can start the reservation step with the click of a button, right under the property information. The EOI process in Step 1 is fairly straightforward: you fill out your personal information, upload an image of your driver's licence and then pay a fully-refundable $1000 holding deposit to make sure no-one else grabs it from underneath you. We've even got a video walkthrough of this process.

At this point the property status is labelled as ‘Under EOI’. Now that you’ve completed Step 1, all your information will be processed and shared with the developers and/or builders of your new home. They’ll draw up the contracts and send them to you, at which point you can start on Step 2.

Step 2

After reading through your contract(s) (there are two rather than one if you’re buying a house and land package), you simply need to sign them and upload them in this step. Abodable also has a Buyer’s Agreement as part of Step 2, which just clarifies and solidifies our relationship with you.

Note: Your contract will specify financial terms, including the period of time for when you need financial approval. This can be 7-28 days, or longer in some cases. This means that you just need to gain financial approval for a loan from a bank within this timeframe. You’ll then upload that letter/proof of approval in the next step.

Your mortgage broker would likely have checked your financial situation with various banks during your initial visit to determine if they’re likely to grant you a loan, so you should likely be set up to be granted approval for a loan.

Step 3

Once you’ve gained approval from a bank or other financial institute, you can upload this letter/proof (usually sent to you as a pdf) to the file upload in Step 3.

Step 4

Once you’ve finished Step 3, you’ve satisfied the financial conditions of the contract (or both contracts if buying house and land). The next step is to satisfy the remaining conditions stipulated in the contract in order to move into ‘unconditional to finance’. This is usually paying the deposit for your home, minus the initial $1000 holding deposit. This could be anywhere from $5000 upwards, but is usually at least 5-10% of the total ticket price of your home and is paid directly to an account specified in your contract, not to us.

Once you have paid that amount, as well as the builders and/or developers have satisfied their side of the contract conditions, you can upload a proof document of this in Step 4. You will then be considered ‘unconditional’ on the contract to your home - this more or less means you’re fully locked in!

Final Steps

After going unconditional, the rest of the time is just a waiting game. If your home is either under construction or is waiting to start construction, you’ll be waiting to hear from us or the builders and/or developers directly for updates and when your settlement date will be. If your home is already completed, you’ll likely be hearing soon on either a settlement date or a date you can move in!

Last of all - your rebate! You’ll receive your full rebate about two weeks after your move-in date/settlement. And that’s that!

It’s obviously still a very involved process, but we streamline the process as much as we possibly can. We’re always looking to improve where we can, especially since this buy-online process is relatively new; so we’d love to hear back from you - feel free to get in touch with us, either using our chat feature in the bottom-right of your screen, or through our contact form here. Happy buying!

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