BUYING IN A MASTER-PLANNED ESTATE - (Part One)

Just imagine; you have just bought your dreamand with a fussy, high maintenance garden.
home online. Now it's not just any house. It hasPerhaps neither of these homes are the type
style and panache and is exactly what you havethat you are searching online for, so it may be
wanted for many years. It is neat, two story,that you need to browse through the thousands
elegant, and very modern. The Japanese gardenof properties at where you can search real
though relatively small, is beautifully landscaped,estate property listings. Just by registering free
and demands to be noticed with discretion andand submitting all the search criteria for the
pride. A few months go by and you learn thatproperty you want to view, you can search for a
your neighbour to the left is planning a replica ofhome anywhere in Australia.
the Parthenon, complete with concrete frontThinking on it, perhaps it is your home, which is
yard, and Aphrodite set in a large fountain withgoing to look entirely foreign.
water streaming from an orifice near her navel.The best way to avoid this sort of architectural
Then a few days later your neighbour to the rightsurprise is buying a home within a 'master-planned'
is scheduling a large version of an Englishcommunity. Master-plan communities can be seen
'miners-cottage', with neat flowering cottageon Ozfree Real Estate section who boast at being
garden, climbing 'Cecile Brunner's', complete withVictoria's leading home builder. On entering their
ubiquitous gnomes. Not that I have anythingsite you can visit their display homes online. These
against the Parthenon; it is a truly beautiful andplans map out the type of development that will
awe-inspiring building, but best left in Greece. Theoccur on a site and where, and can establish
English miner's-cottage, on the other hand, is goingdesign standards, view-sharing principles,
to be very much out of place with its singlelandscaping and even lawn maintenance.
frontage, built on a much larger scale of course,