Buying a house in NZ is different than in America. For one, buyers do not have real estate agents. We haven't had any agent helping us find a house, although plenty of sellers' agents have been on our asses, asking for feedback from their open homes. Word to the wise: when you go to an open home in NZ, if you are not interested in the house, leave a fake phone number on their registry. Otherwise, they will call you.
Another difference is that we had to hire a lawyer. We did not need a lawyer to buy our house in Arizona. Our lawyer will sort out the title for us and get a LIM (Land Information Memorandum) from the city council for us. This will tell us if there are any improvements to the house that were not properly permitted by the council, where the easements are, how old the house is, etc.
Our offer has been accepted now, so we're in the "conditional" phase. Our offer was conditional on the title, LIM, and a building report being satisfactory to us. We have a home inspector going to the house tomorrow to have a look-see. We were amazed to find out from the lawyer that only about 5% of home buyers in NZ bother with a building inspection. This may be due to the prevalent attitude here that "she'll be right." We don't yet have that attitude. We can't imagine taking on a mortgage without first having some assurance that the house isn't about to fall down.
We have 7 days to get this stuff sorted, and then our contract goes unconditional (assuming we're happy with the information we get). There's no escrow or title company involved. Our deposit is sitting in the sellers' estate agent's trust account. On the day we close, our bank will pay the rest of the money to the seller (or their mortgage holder, I guess), and it will be done. We hear there are only a couple pieces of paper to sign when we close. Not like in America, where we had to take half a day off work to go to the title company and endure a marathon document-signing exercise.
We close on February 1st.
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