Do the boring checks before you fall.

Nobody makes a bad decision on purpose. What happens is more ordinary. You see six homes in a morning, one of them is warm and light and the photographs did not do it justice, and by the afternoon you are building an argument for it rather than testing one. Take the asking price, add the transfer duty that would apply after any concession, add the registry fees, the conveyancer and the inspection, then see what is left of your savings. Do this before you go, because doing it afterwards means doing it while attached to the answer you want.

The listing describes the building. Almost everything that will cost you money later is about the land it sits on, and none of it is in the photographs. Whether the block floods, and from what: a creek, a storm tide, or overland flow across the yard in heavy rain, which are three different problems with three different fixes. What the zoning permits, on the site and on the empty block next door. Whether a heritage or character overlay limits what you may change. What the council has already approved nearby. Byrz draws every one of those from government mapping, and says plainly where a layer does not cover the address rather than reporting an absence as an all clear.

Agents are not lying to you, but a home is presented, and presentation is designed to answer the questions you have not asked yet. Open things. Run the taps. Look at the ceiling in every room, and at the wall where it meets the ceiling. Then go outside and look at the ground, because where water sits after rain stays written on the ground long after the rain has gone.

Inspections are held at the best hour of the week for the home, and that is not an accusation, it is just how they are scheduled. A west facing living room is pleasant at ten on a Saturday and unusable at five in February. A street beside a school is silent at eleven and impassable at three. A flight path runs to a timetable that has nothing to do with when you were standing there. If you are seriously considering a home, drive back past it once at the hour you would be coming home, and once on a weekend night. It costs an hour, it is the only part of the inspection nobody can do for you, and it is the check most often skipped.

This is where the professionals earn their fee. A building and pest inspection, and a conveyancer reading the contract, are the two purchases that most reliably return more than they cost. If the process is moving too fast for both to happen, then the speed is the problem, and the speed is usually somebody else's interest rather than yours. The expensive mistakes are always the same ones: skipping the building and pest to look competitive at auction, where there is no cooling off period and no way back out; treating the first lender's answer as the only answer; counting on a concession nobody has confirmed you qualify for; and leaving nothing in reserve, so the first repair becomes a crisis instead of an inconvenience.