After over 4 years of pain trying to obtain finance for a property with a Heritage Listing ….I have finally done so….
My comment here is provided for anyone looking at a property which has a “Heritage” Listing.
It took me 4 years++, a huge rise in the property value and a mortgage broker in another State to finally achieve it…
The problem was with the “Mortgage Insurers” not actually with many of the Banks.
There are actually only I believe, 3 Insurers in Aus but they effectively underwrite (and control) ALL loans when the Banks want mortgage insurance.
This is when the LVR (loan valuation ratio) exceeds the Banks limit which is usually around 65% of the Official Bank Valuation.
Interestingly….I have been “unable” to get any of this in “writing“…
Springer
Some one some day will take a council to court to recover value degraded from a property due to it’s listing as heritage status.
One example is an old qlder on 1200+m3 (cnr of logan and miles platting rd eight mile plains.) This would surely be a near $1m commercial site but due to heritage listing sold at auction recently for 500k. Imagine how you would feel if you purchased this property 20yrs ago…tolerated it’s dual main road frontage… expecting to be able to develop one day only to find you can’t do anything.
Ben
PS…make sure you don’t paint it the wrong colour springer or the heritage police will be onto you?!?!?
…but without protection, all the incredible architecture, detail and history of these houses would be lost, only to have 2 or 3 box-shaped, Beiruit style ‘townhouses’ crammed onto their original blocks… is this really more desireable?
F.[cowboy2]Hard to say, one’s looking at it from the human side of things and one is looking at the piece of dirt as a lump of cash ??
When it’s mine, I look at it as a lump of cash. When someone else owns it, everyone has the luxury of thinking, and is happy to go down the “Oh that looks nice, it’d be a shame to demolish that”.
What gets my goat is when the Heritage Listing nazis, without a dollar at risk, use the council’s power to upgrade that “it’d be a shame” to a “you will not”.
Classic case was a few years back when some ‘elderly hoi paloi lady’ objected to a development at the old Raffles location on the river in Applecross WA. She remembered way back when she was a lass in the ’30’s and what a landmark magnificent building it was. The owner of the land remarked that if she liked it so much and wanted to keep it, she was most welcome to buy it off him and keep it as is forever. However, as usual, she wanted to impose her will without having to stump up the $ 35 MM needed to own it. Perhaps back in the ’30’s she could of got together with her friends and instead of living the high life, saved up and purchased the site when it wasn’t so outrageously expensive.
Who knows.
We ahve one heritage listed Ip and never had a problem getting finance, although we didn’t need mortgage insurance so perhpas that was the difference. My bank and I believe most others would allow an LVR of 80% nowadays, although I don’t know your situatio so perhpas there’s a reason for the 65% LVR.
We’ve also never had a problem getting approval from the heritage council for any work or changes we’ve wanted or needed to do. We had more hassles from the council as they didn’t believe the heritage council would approve the work we were doing even though we had a letter of approval. It took them 12 weeks to pick up the phone and ask the hertigage council verbally if it was in fact approved. They said “yes, we said so in the letter”, council then approved it.
Other than that slight hiccup we’ve never had anything that I’d consider an issue with the heritage listing.
PK
that Raffles building is one U-G-L-Y redevelopment… why you’d pay that much to live there is beyond me.
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