BuyUrSide with Bart

Jack from BuyUrSide
Hi Bart, can you please introduce yourself and your house buying journey?

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
Hi my name is Bart and I've been on a house buying journey for 3-4 months now with my wife. It's been hectic, and overwhelming. It's our first house so we are just trying to get our head around process itself and what everything meant. So many different documents, there's so much information overload, so many legal terms, so many new terms, and it's a massive headache to get yourself up to pace with what you are looking at when you are going to go look at a house.

Jack from BuyUrSide
Can you tell us what you got out of the BuyUrSide experience and a little bit about what the service is and why you went with it.

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
I found that going through council documents and all of the different documentation that you get sent is an absolute headache and not a user friendly experience at all. The BuyUrSide reports took all of that information, made it readable, and gave me the things I needed to know upfront without me having to dive into the document so I could get a real sense of a property at a glance and figure out pretty quickly if it's something I anted to do further diligence on or whether or not I should just can it and not bother. So just made the whole process of getting that information that I wanted in a way that was user friendly and easy to consume. It was even a joy to get them and to read them.

Jack from BuyUrSide
Would you recommend a BuyUrSide report for other people going through the property purchase experience?

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
From my experience I would totally recommend it. the BuyUrSide reports pulled out really crucial information on houses. Information that even the agent and the vendor hadn't realised about the house. In one instance it was an EQC (insurance) report that had been swept under the rug. The BuyUrSide report was able to pull up and we were able to get further information on that EQC claim. A few other examples of really crucial information that were huge potential red flags that if we hadn't gotten the report we wouldn't know about. So massively grateful to the guys and the team at BuyUrSide for making something so user friendly and helpful in our house buying process... Because we now have a house and we are stoked with it!

Jack from BuyUrSide
Awesome. That's amazing Bart. We appreciate that. One thing we'd like to finish with is if you were to give some tips to other people about to go through the process, can you talk us through the number 1 tip, the least useful tip, and perhaps the funniest one you've received?

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
My number one tip for people going through the house buying process is to get ruthless on what you want early so you go to the right open homes. Don't go to too many open homes otherwise you will get exhausted. We found that after a few months you start to down grade your view of what you want and make sacrifices on what you want maybe too quickly. make sure you take breaks when you are in the process, and weekends off from going to open homes so you don't burn out and make a shitty decision on something that you don't actually want. It is a house, it is the biggest purchase of your life so far. Buy something that you are going to be happy living in.

Jack from BuyUrSide
The least useful tip?

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
Tip that was least useful? Man... Don't know. Can't remember...

Jack from BuyUrSide
Good indicator it wasn't very useful!

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
Yeah haha got it out of my brain quickly.

Jack from BuyUrSide
And the funniest one? One that was a bit ridiculous... the rubber mallet comes to mind...

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
The rubber mallet! I thought the rubber mallet was a great idea!

Jack from BuyUrSide
It is great advice, it is just also hilarious.

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
We had one house we looked at that had beautiful wooden beams. They were exposed to the outside and we got some advice to check the wood was solid and you could use a rubber mallet to bang on the beams. So here I was turning up on an open home with a rubber mallet banging no beams around the house, with the real estate agent asking what i was up to. I was just like trying to find the integrity of the wood. They were like please don't break the house. I did try not to. And I didn't! Didn't buy that house though.

Jack from BuyUrSide
Anything else you want to share with anyone who is looking at buying a house or going for one of these reports?

Bart de Vries - first home buyer
I think these reports are a bit of no brainer really. At worst give you information that you already know. At best you get new insights and they pick up on things that other people aren't picking up on. So I think it's a no brainer. We got one for every house we were seriously considering. We are definitely using them in the future again. Super useful tool!