7 Chamberlain Street

Transfer duty is a tax on the transaction itself, paid to the state, and on most purchases it is far larger than everything else combined. The registration fees pay the state titles office to record who owns the lot and who holds the mortgage over it. Conveyancing pays a person to read the contract, run the searches that tell you whether the property is affected by anything, and move the money on settlement day. Building and pest pays an inspector to walk the home before you are committed.

A published rate is set by a government, either applies to you or does not, and you can check it against the schedule yourself in a minute. A typical range is an observation Byrz has made about what people are charged, and nobody is bound by it. A page that mixes the two into one total without saying which is which has misled you by its shape, whatever its words said. Ring two conveyancers and find out what yours will be.

A lender lends against the property, not against the cost of buying it, so none of these charges can be added to the loan. They come out of the same savings you were going to put down, and they come out first. That means the price you can reach is not your savings divided by a deposit percentage: it is your savings, minus all of this, divided by a deposit percentage. People find this out at the wrong end, usually a week before settlement.

Byrz does not put a price on any home. Every figure here is worked out from one price: the one this listing states, or the one you put in yourself, and the card says which. Byrz does not know your savings, so it shows reference deposits rather than your position. It does not decide whether a concession applies to you: the state revenue office does that, on the transfer, and a conveyancer will tell you where you stand before you sign.

It reads the photos on the listing. It sorts them by room, then looks at things like benchtops, tiles, floors and paint. It compares what it sees with what that kind of work usually costs. It never visits the home, and it never sees anything the photos do not show.

Adding every room together would give you a number that looks precise and is not. Most people do not redo every room, homes get fixed up in stages, and any room with no photo is invisible to us. So we show you the one room that stands out, and we leave the adding up to a real quote.

A lot. Photos can be years old, or taken right after a tidy up. What you choose matters more than what is there now: the same kitchen can cost $10,000 or $60,000 depending on what you put in it. Prices also differ between towns and cities. Treat this as a starting point for a conversation, not a budget.