Walter Road – Tenants finally
First tenant is in! He passed all the checks easily and the final certificate was issued today, so it was a go.
We are also celebrating the final construction steps being finished, and very much looking forward to the day that all the rooms are filled and the income starts coming in.
We have a few little snags to sort out, and one room still needs the curtains put up, but the place is “ready”! . This has been a long, hard road, with many ups and downs. The amount of cash we “lost” to the first builder did not help, let alone the extra holding costs of almost 9 months from the time it should have finished in March until now. The journey involved a Project Manager trying to bully more money from us in order to continue to do works, to legally severing the contract due to them not delivering the project, hiring a new builder and getting moving again, then summer holiday delays, then Christmas delays. Seems that starting a project in Jan or Feb with the aim to finish by June is the best option if you don’t want to be hit with extra holding costs over these holiday periods – Christmas isn’t too bad at 2 weeks, but August was 4-5 weeks – the builders seem to like their school holidays 😉
To sum up the lessons, talked about here and in previous posts
- have a floor plan, know best bed and furniture positions way in advance so you can plan for power socket locations;
- get any utilities in as early as possible;
- keep a list of issues outstanding for the project, get updated on them weekly;
- organise furniture finance earlier if leasing; and most importantly
- don’t trust someone with a money by (over) paying in advance without security or a professional escrow service.
A hard lesson here is that, referrals are so important. We trust our referrals and the people we work with refer great people to us. However, we now think that Kevin Green is an exception to this, and we no longer trust any of his referrals or recommendations. Having attended other property courses, we now know that the knowledge we got in his course was quite basic if not outdated, and promotes reliance on his sourcers. As a result of our experience, as you can imagine, we do not recommend him or his coaching program at all any more.
Jun & Craig Lambie
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