What's a house worth without land underneath it?

What's a house worth without land underneath it? Not much!

My wife and I have been buying and selling second hand goods for as long as we could read the trading post.  Furniture, cars, electronic goods, baby stuff, you name it, we've bought and sold.  Selling goods second hand can be a really random experience.  Some things go in seconds, like the deck and the fence for instance.  I thought they would sit there forever but they were sold the day after advertising them.  I literally had multiple buyers on my property trying to outbid each other over the deck.

Gumtree, the greatest Aussie invention.

Selling the house to be removed off our block took seven months.  The removal home companies make more money moving a house directly to the new owners property but only after all the approvals have been granted and bonds paid.  Straight after signing up with a removal company  there was immediate interest, then nothing for two months.   In hindsight I think we were never going to what we wanted fro the house. None of the companies said "you're dreaming" when they probably should have.

So the house was not selling, and I began scheming up ways to get money for it.  One scheme was to buy some land out in woop woop, move the house there and on sell it ASAP.   I did the sums and worked out it wasn't going to be worth it.  We may have made, 20k or we may have lost 20k and it would have taken a lot of time and effort.  Also, most regional councils require a bond if you are going move a removal home on to your block. This is to make sure it's actually going to be a real home and not just dumped there.  We gave up on the schemes and decided to try and sell again.

The house still made it to woop woop.

Gumtree had been good to us, so we advertised privately on gumtree and got a good offer from a small removal home company.  It was subject to permission for tree trimming in our street,  BUT... the council guy said no.  The house could still be removed, but the house needed to be chopped in half so the offer was halved. I got some quotes for clearing the block after the house was gone and realised that the money we would get wouldn't cover the cost for site clean up. It's pretty standard for these removal home people to buy the house for a dollar on the condition that it was gone and the site cleaned up by a certain date so we negotiated down again... to a dollar, on condition the site was cleared after the removal.  We got a contract saying so.

I had completed all the disconnections by the agreed disconnection date.  There was some trouble with the electricity and the plumber took a week longer than he promised, but they were all done on time. I called the removal guy up and asked when the house would go.  He said by the "gone by" date.  I then asked what the likelihood of it going earlier was.  He said "not likely".  The house had already been on sold and he was going to delay for as long as he could until approvals for it's new location were ready.  The "gone by" date came and I called him expecting excuses.  I was shocked and elated when I was told that it would be gone by tomorrow night and the site cleaned up by the end of the week.  Awesome!!!

The morning of the move day came and it was already on big trailers with the roof being taken off.  In the afternoon it was cut in half and the trailers were ready to go.  The next morning it was gone.  Clearing the site is another story and, as of now, still not finished.