After we first spoke to Maryanne, we started the pre-approval process to figure out how much they could borrow.  We noticed however that only two banks at the time would accept her income in the loan application. One of those lenders had a very competitive offer, though would take longer to approve the loan as that particular lender was under the pump given they were very popular with overseas borrowers.

Within a few days, Maryanne came back to us and said she had found a great development opportunity in Box Hill and had already made an offer for $890,000, (sensibly) with a “subject to finance” clause.

We had recommended Box Hill because it has appealed to a lot of new immigrants and overseas buyers recently with developments on apartments and townhouses being the main focus. We ran a few further reports on the property in Box Hill and were happy with what we saw. This area offered excellent amenities, with shops, education facilities, public transport and was a reasonable distance to the Melbourne CBD.

Based on the property data, the average Box Hill house price in 2015 was approximately $1 million and unit sales ranged from $340k to $600k. The most surprising fact however was that in 2016 Box Hill experienced a 43% growth in capital value on houses, however units rose by only 4.6%, which meant there was a lot of growth potential for the land Maryanne and Tim had purchased.