House Storage Yards, the Good the Bad and the Ugly

Looking for a house to buy for removal can be a time consuming exercise. One of the ways to see a number of homes in the one place is to visit a House Removal Storage Yard. However, before you jump in the car and head off to your local "Used House Lot" to kick the stumps and tap on the walls, here are a few tips which might help you in your search for your dream home. Lets start with how it all began.

Storing houses became necessary when councils and local authorities began regulating and requiring approval prior to allowing houses to be moved onto residential sites. This meant in many cases houses had to be removed from existing sites before approvals could be obtained for the site they were being moved to, and so they needed somewhere they could be stored until the approvals were granted at the final destination.

Some House Removers realised that instead of just moving houses for their clients, they could buy up old houses, put them in a yard and start selling them like used cars on a dealers lot. Once the word got out and house yards started springing up around the place, particularly in South East Queensland where there was plenty of redevelopment going on in the 1980's and 1990's, House Removal started to become a better known alternative to new construction.

So nowadays there a quite a few house storage yards you can visit with houses just sitting there waiting for a new owner or the required approvals before being moved to their new home site. Is this a good place to start? Here are some things you should consider before you race out the door.

Today we have the wonderful invention of the Internet. This tool is incredibly useful and can save you enormous amounts of time when researching and looking for houses to buy. You will find that nearly every house for sale for removal will be listed on the internet somewhere. Start by searching for homes online, you can find them in all sorts of places and doing a Google search using terms such as Homes for Removal, Removable Homes, Relocatable Homes for example, will give you lots of links to follow. It also helps to refine your search to a specific area, such as trying "Removal Homes Brisbane".

The best sites will give you photos, floor plans and other detail so you can get a very good idea of what is on offer and how the homes compare to each other, so you can narrow down your search to just the ones that interest you, saving you a lot of leg work on the ground. On some websites you can even subscribe to an email notification service that will automatically email you new listings as they are published.

Due to effective marketing through websites these days, many homes are sold before being moved, and most are delivered direct to final site without ever being stored, so to limit your search to homes in yards will limit your choice of available homes.

You will also find that house yards are mostly full of houses already sold that are just transitioning to final site, and that the remaining ones in the yards for sale are the least desirable ones that take a lot longer to sell.

It is not surprising then that the feedback we get from people who have visited house yards almost always includes comments like "none of the houses we inspected are any good" or "the ones for sale are pretty rough and need lots of work".

The best deals and the best homes are to be found not in yards, but still on their original site. Developers are better educated about house removal these days and are allowing more time to have houses removed making it possible to obtain the approvals at the new site before moving the home. This saves everyone involved in the process time and money. The seller gets a better price because the House Remover does not have to factor in a double shift. Some of the savings are usually passed onto the buyer as well to encourage a quicker sale which is in the interests of the seller. Everybody wins, even the House Removal Company because they can sell and move more houses and make more money by not having to move each one twice. Double handling and storage only add to cost and time which ends up being distributed to everyone in the selling chain.

House stock is expensive to hold so most House Removal companies don't like to keep much unsold stock in a yard. They tend not to buy the nicer more expensive homes to put in a yard as they are more costly to buy and then hold. You will find therefore that the better presented, and significantly renovated homes for removal will be found for sale from original sites.

Something else to consider is that most houses were never designed to be moved, and therefore the less a house is moved the better. There is much less chance of damage or other work required when a house is moved just once. Houses due to their size have to be stored out in the open, and anything stored in the open for long periods of time can deteriorate. Its best to move a home straight from its point of origin then place it back on solid and level foundations as soon as possible with completion work started as soon as possible thereafter.

So, the best way to search for and buy a home for removal is to start with a search on the internet, narrow down the ones you want to see, then make appointments with the seller to view them. Remember that many will still be occupied by the original owner or a tenant, so adequate notice prior to inspections may be necessary.

Happy House Hunting.