July 2019

As it turned out July 2019 was a memorable month.

We had sisters Alison and Lynette stay for 3 nights while on their way to celebrate Alison’s 70^th birthday in Vietnam,

Helen had a program arranged and two highlights were a dinner at Suffolk House for our ‘official’ septuagenarian celebration and the other was going across to the mainland for the Silent Auction where the fisherman arrive on each side of the river a negotiate the price of their catch. We also visited the tsunami monument that consists of boats that were damaged in the tsunami.

 

It is in a non-photographic phase and my only shots are on the beach walk with Coco. I love sunrises and their various moods. The walk is never the same with rock paintings, stray puppies, stalking cats and even otters eating fish (damn that was the only morning I did not have my camera).

This unknown person, below, seems to sleep under the palm tree and on top of an upturned dragon-boat most nights...the high tide would be only a few feet away

The big news, for which we have waited 18 months to occur, happened on the last day of the month. The house was sold.

The whole business was not pleasant. Our original plan was to stay in Penang for around 5 years until University fees ceased the drain on our economy. In hindsight we should have put the house on the market according to plan. We were a year and a half too late. The market had peaked and was sliding downhill, albeit slowly, and unforeseen building works threatened the nice ambience of the neighbourhood. We had the following problems;

1. There were around 25 similar houses on the market.

2. We were looking at a small population of buyers....local well-off Chinese.

3. We became aware that buyers were little interested in improvements and looked only at size and price.

4. The dreaded Fengshui became an issue in determining sales.....we were pointed in the wrong way apparently. Chinese friends tell me that Fengshui masters are overpaid and can come to any conclusions.

5. The agents are generally lazy and communicated very poorly with us.

6. Major works in the area have prompted other homeowners to sell

We had dropped our asking price twice in 15months. Research in early July indicated that NOT ONE HOME on the estate had sold this year. We decided to stand out from the pack and dropped the asking price even further. That strategy seemed to work.

Some nostalgia

We had one offer, but the bank did not play ball in granting a loan. In retrospect I doubt the seriousness of that offer. We had several half-hearted low offers.

We had 12 agents working for us...although 3-4 never brought any potential buyers. We had 63 punters visit in 18 months with the majority, by a long way, being in 2019. This July seemed to see a cut-off in viewers......except for the critical one. This punter too was interesting....we had a low offer without an inspection (it turns out his friend has a house not far away so he was obviously familiar with the layout). With some negotiation with the agent we got the price up by150,000 MYR. It was lower than our asking price, but we were prepared to settle at this point, which would also ensure that we could stay in Penang. I won’t go into these details, but we were 7 days away from being forced to quit Penang. The main reason we are here is that the money we have goes further than it would in Australia or NZ.  It is not a close race....stats say NZ is twice as expensive so our tank would drain twice as fast. Any place has compromises and we are OK with what is available here.

Settlement will take around 5 months so we have plenty of time to prepare. We will look for an apartment roughly in the general area. On the plus side we have made over 1 million ringgit and of course had free rent that would amount to another half-million ringgit saved.

In the pub quiz we have had a good period with 5 firsts in the last 6 weeks.

From Brisbane below is the latest picture of Hayley and the multi-talented Phoebe who swaps achieving at different sports to playing music in a city-centre performance.