You don’t have to be in a couple to buy your first home, says Katie Brown, who bought hers with the help of the government-supported Welcome Home Loan.
The social media analyst was 26 when she bought her first home, a three-bedroom property in Petone, a suburb on the northern shore of Wellington Harbour.
Though owning her own home had been on her radar since she was in her late teens, it wasn’t until she was in her mid-twenties that she decided the time was right. The fact that she was spending $250 a week in rent on a room in central Wellington was a motivating factor.
“I’ve always had my dad whispering in my ear, ‘You should buy a house, buy a house, buy a house’, and one day, I just started looking at real estate,” she says. “I was brought up to think that it’s better to have your own home than to be paying for someone else’s.”
Katie Brown at home with Lily Photo: Supplied
Though Katie had been saving for a deposit for a couple of years, “it didn’t feel like a long time,” she remembers.
“I’d always put aside money, and in the job I was in at the time, even though my base salary was a lot lower than it is now, I could get bonuses every quarter I did well. So I was getting these big chunks of two, three, four grand at a time, and I’d just put that into savings.”
Working towards her goal of owning her own home meant making do in other areas of her life. “All my friends had flash cars, when I drove the same car that I learned how to drive in until it broke,” she says. “It’s those sorts of decisions – you either want to invest in material things, or make big financial decisions for the long-term.”
Because Katie had been contributing to KiwiSaver for less than the required three years, she wasn’t able to withdraw her savings or apply for its deposit subsidy, but she was eligible for the government-supported Welcome Home Loan.
With the help of a mortgage manager at Kiwibank, she was able to work out the “upper limit” of what she was entitled to under the scheme. After taking into account the region in which she was looking to buy, how much she had in savings for a 10 per cent deposit, and her credit history, she was granted a pre-approval certificate from the bank, and three to six months to look for a house.
Katie started looking at properties within a specific price bracket in the greater Wellington region, as far out as Wainuiomata. “The mortgage manager had given me all of the figures, so I knew when I was hitting the upper-end of what I could afford, and how that would affect how much disposable income I’d have, and how much I had to spend on doing up the house.”
She’d had no aspirations of living in central Wellington, and accepted the trade-off of owning her own home would be a longer commute. “I immediately assumed that I’d be out in the ‘burbs; I didn’t even look at town, because I knew there was no way I could afford it.”
The terms of the Welcome Home Loan, which require that the house be ready to live in, also guided her choice. “It’s got to be a ready-to-live-in house, it can’t be a doer-upper,” she says. “There was quite a good house in a suburb I wanted to live in, but it didn’t have a kitchen. I was quite willing to pay $10,000 or so to have one put in, but they wouldn’t let that happen.”
Though she found the open home experience a bit overwhelming (“You never really know what you’re looking for, and you don’t know how much to trust real estate agents; they’re really nice, but they’re trying to get their commission”), she put in offers on “a lot” of houses.
Katie ended up with a three-bedroom house in Petone, with a two-car garage and a “really big” backyard (“My dad wants me to subdivide it, but it’s not going to happen”).
Katie Brown: "It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made" Photo: Supplied
At the time, she was 26, and three years out of university.
Aside for a few “niggly things”, Katie was surprised at how painless the process was. “Most people are like, ‘Oh, it must be so hard’, but to be honest, everything went really smoothly,” she says. “My offer was accepted, and the lawyers sorted out the transfer of money, and I dealt with the conveyancing company mostly by email.”
She’s now 28, and lives in the house with two flatmates, whose rent goes towards her mortgage. Katie herself pays half what she spent on rent for a room in Wellington city.
There have been “a few headaches”, she says. In the storm that wreaked havoc in the Wellington region in June, a branch went through her roof. “There was a $1000 excess to get that fixed.”
Plus, when she moved into the house, it hadn’t been lived in for three years, and a couple of visits from the electrician were necessary to get the power on.
But she has “absolutely” no regrets. “It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” she says.
It takes Katie just 13 minutes to drive into Wellington city when there’s no traffic, and living out of town has come to suit her lifestyle. “I made it a mission in my first year to only do activities in the Hutt, and now I’ve made a community out here,” she says. “I’m really thankful for living out here now.”
Though she will “probably” sell the house in future, in the meantime, she is focused on converting it into a family home.
“It will sell more easily as a family home; if it’s my family, cool; if it’s for someone else’s, cool,” she says. “The location is perfect for schools; it’s on all the main transport lines; there’s a big backyard. They’re calling Petone the ‘new North Shore’… but I don’t want it to be the new North Shore. I think it’s closer.”
Katie says it was important for her to view it as her first rung on the property ladder. “I had to keep telling myself, ‘It’s not my dream home, it’s an investment’,” she says. “I think that’s a mistake a lot of people make: ‘it must have a bath, it must have this, it must have that’. Just get something – get anything – and then you can use that to help you buy your dream home.”
