The questions people ask us, answered straight.

You’re ready when you know two things: what a lender will put in front of you in writing, and what an ordinary week looks like once the repayment comes out of it. The second catches people out more than the first. Once you can answer both, the rest is looking at houses.

It depends on your finance and on whether the house exists yet. An established home moves at a different pace to a build, and a build moves at the builder’s. We won’t print a number here, because the honest one changes with your file. Ring and describe where you’re up to, and we’ll tell you what the next few months look like.

They’re two different problems. An established home is a known quantity you can walk through, and what you see is what you get, including the wiring and the neighbour’s tree. A package is new, you choose more of what goes into it, and you wait. We have a guide that lays the two side by side, and we’ll go through it with you either way.

Then we keep looking. We would rather you buy nothing this year than buy something you resent for the next ten. If a home isn’t right for you, we’ll say so.

No, and it’s worth testing. People fix on one suburb because a cousin bought there, and a few streets in another direction can be a different price and a different feel entirely. Say what you need from a place, and we’ll show you both.

A selling agent is engaged by the seller, and that’s true of us as well, so it’s better said out loud than dressed up. What we control is what you get told. If something is wrong with a house, you’ll hear it from us before a building inspector finds it.

The commission on a sale is paid by the vendor, not by you. Anything else that ever came into it, you would hear about from us on the phone, not read in small type at the bottom of a page.

Yes. Walk through a place, ask your questions, go home and think about it. Nobody will ring you every Tuesday afterwards. If you want us watching for something in particular we’ll do that, and if you want to be left alone we’ll do that, and you only have to say it once.

We’re building the practice so the finance and the paperwork sit at the same table as the house, and it isn’t running yet. When it is, this site will say so. Until then, ask us where it’s up to and you’ll get the current answer rather than the hopeful one.

Mostly. New builds, house and land, townhouses and family homes across the South East, and now and then an older place on a bigger block or a shop with a business attached. Not everything we have is on the listings page, so if what you want isn’t there, ring and ask.

It’s a payment from the state for eligible buyers of new homes, with conditions attached both to the property and to you. The amount and the conditions move, and a web page can sit here for two years without noticing. We sit down and check what applies to you at the time you’re buying.

There are concessions and exemptions in Victoria for first home buyers, and what you pay depends on the price and on the property. Same answer as the grant: we look up the current rules together rather than quoting you something we read last year.

A broker works that out from your income, your debts and your deposit, and the answer is far more personal than any calculator on the internet suggests. Get it before you fall for a house. It changes which streets are worth walking down.

The vendor statement. It’s the document that tells you what you’re really buying: the title, the outgoings, whatever is registered against the land. It comes attached to the contract, and it’s the one people skim. We read it with you, out loud, and we stop wherever you want to stop.

Money moves, the title changes hands, and you get the keys. All the work is in the weeks before it, which is the point. If we’ve done our part, the day itself contains no new information. There’s a guide here that walks through the whole thing.

All of it. The call, the walk-through, the offer, the waiting and the settlement figures. You won’t be moved into English to make it easier for us, and you won’t have to book a translator a week ahead.

The contract and the vendor statement stay in English, because that’s what gets signed in Victoria. What changes is that you hear every page in your own language first, and you can send us back to any clause as many times as you like. Nothing gets signed on a nod.

Bring them. They’re usually the ones watching the number most closely and the ones nobody speaks to directly. We’ll talk to them, in their language, and we’ll wait while they think it over.

Cranbourne East, Cranbourne, Clyde, Doveton, Hampton Park, Dandenong, Narre Warren and Berwick. We only work the streets we actually know, and those are the ones we spend our own weekends in.

We’ll tell you, rather than pretend. A suburb we don’t walk is one we can’t read, and you are better off with somebody who lives in it. Ring anyway, and if we can point you at somebody sensible we will.