A Close Call - Almost No Mercer!

A day after I wrote the last Entry Metricon issued us with a breach notice due to the delays with the bank. It played out something like this:

Bank Finance
27th Feb 2009 - Signed Metricon Contract, and dropped off contract to Mortgage Broker. We have 30 days to get signed bank contracts and council approval to make the contract unconditional.

15th Mar 2009 - Started to follow-up with Mortgage Broker to see how things were going.

27th Mar 2009 - Now our 30 days are up, luckily Metricon realises the delays with the banks and thety are really busy as well and gives us 2 weeks grace period. I have notified the bank that I need this actioned ASAP and they have 14 days to finalise my loan, keeping in mind they have had it since the start of Feb.

17th Apr 2009 - I've been following up with the banks non stop for the last 2 weeks and I have got no where, in fact they have barely worked on it, it has spent most of its time with the Insurance companies.

22nd Apr 2009 - I finally get the formal approval, however this isn't good enough for Metricon they give me 2 days to sign the docs, however the bank need 48 hours to process the docs and send them from Adelaide to Melbourne.

23rd Apr 2009 - Continually follow up with the bank and broker and get no where. Nothing happens 1 day out from our deadline.

24th Apr 2009 - Spend the day on the phone to the broker, call the bank a few times to follow up and find out the docs were finally sent. However it is late and they won't arrive in Melbourne until Monday. Call Metricon and I am advised that it is too late and that unless my docs are in my customer service co-ordinators mailbox first thing Monday I will be breached. I booked an appointment at the bank first thing on Monday morning the 27th hoping the docs would be there.

What does this mean? Well we weren't issued with a fine which is normally 1.5% of the value of the house, instead it just says they will cancel the contract and we would have to buy the house at the current price. Because we got smashed with LMI, that's further down we would have had to cancel the contract and possibly choose another house or take out some of our upgrades.

At this point it wasn't looking good and the blog name would have become irrelevant because it wouldnt' have been our mercer anymore.

I called Metricon about 11.30am and was seriously considering flying to Adelaide to sign the contracts on the 1.00pm flight at a cost of about $1200 which would have been cheaper than any fines we received, plus the pain of choosing another builder or modifying our house.

27th Apr 2009 - After a really stressful week, worrying weekend and a nervous morning we drove to the branch to our 9.30am appointment. Casey called on the way there as we were advised to and after what seemed like an eternity it was confirmed that our documents had arrived. We promptly signed the documents, finished our first home owners grant form and went up stairs (luckily I work in the Westpac building) to send off our signed finance contracts to Metricon. After clarifying a few points about our land amount I received the confirmation email that we were all good to go.

We literally scraped in by a couple of hours, I was advisd by Metricon that if I didn't have the contract in by the 3.00pm mail run I would receive a notice in the mail.


Council Approval - Report & Consent
Our garage height on our neighbours side is 15cm higher than the rescode regulations so we need council and neighbour approval to build it. The reason this happened is because we had to remove the eaves on the side of our garages to not infringe on our neighbours property.

5th Mar 2009 - Took title of the land.

6th Mar 2009 - We dropped off our report and consent forms to the council. Normally they say
to allow 1 week to process 17 days for neighbour to appeal, 1 week to advise.

22nd Apr 2009 - We had followed up a few times however Casey followed up again and was advised that our neighbour on Monday requested an extention for 5 days to receive feedback from her builder if this was ok.

23rd Apr 2009 - I called the council and after about 3 calls that day I finally got onto the right person, and he actually called me back at 5.15pm and was very helpful. He advised me that initially the letter had been sent to the wrong person as Villawood had sold the block to a different person and the council had the old records. After realising the mistake the council found the correct person a few weeks before and only gave them 7 days instead of the 17 days to approve the request.

The catch is that the neighbour didn't leave a forwarding telephone number and the council couldn't follow up. They didn't have a problem but couldn't approve the request without speaking to our neighbour. I mentioned they were building with Symonds and the council actually called Symonds on Friday to find out her details. The council said they would contact me on Friday to let me know how they went.

24th Apr 2009 - I called the council about 11.45am, they had managed to find our neighbours phone number and were waiting for a call back. About 2.30pm they sent through the fax with our approval, they were really, really helpful and did us a favour by faxing through the letter rather than posting it. This was again a close shave, if we had to wait for the mail we would have missed our deadline and breached our contract.


The Conclusion:

• Don't use a broker, they try to maintain relationships with the bank more than they want to help you. That said, ours did his best, but not as good as someone from within the bank.

• If you use a broker, you always need to go to them, that means any issues you have 2 years from now, you need to do through your broker, probably not the most convenient option.

• Follow up, follow up again and again, and again!!! We did and it was probably only because we hassled people (just enough) that we managed to scrape in.

• We went through 7 months of planning to literally scrape through by a couple of hours from having everything pulled out from underneath us. On my earlier point about putting a deposit down early, I definitely recommend this to get a discount on the house, but be very careful we came within 5 hours of it being of massive consequence.

• Be prepared for many delays that are completely out of our control. We had no one come back to us at any point with any issues, in fact they told us our situation was pretty clean cut, it doesn't mean they'll process your loan quickly though.
  

Where to from here...well Metricon have 30 days to get Building Approval and then 21 days from then to be onsite...the countdown begins!!! I need a beer!