Now I worked for a short stint in Property Services at the University of Otago and most of my income had accumulated in a savings account. Lucky for us we had purposefully not adjusted to spending this extra money.

As my term at work was coming to an end I saw an ad for this house. I had been very gingerly looking at housing. Mostly the classic Villas like we were living in. So, when this State House went up for sale two blocks from our rental and I wanted to buy, it was a little surprising.

Now it turned out that the shooting I mentioned before was between two rival gangs renting around the corner from each other. As a fallout of the incident they both moved out. Apparently the neighbors signed a petition and Housing NZ evicted them as a result.

Did you guess yet?

This was the “gang” house, up for sale. So, you can imagine that there was not a huge interest in the property.

Now I get these pulls, hunches, intuition, you can call it a lot of things. My husband wasn’t really into them, but he had learned when it was strong enough you listen to Valeri, and this pull was really strong. I wasn’t giving in and we had the down payment in the bank. He wasn’t keen on moving in, but maybe we could rent it out.

I approached our property manager, Ewan, for an evaluation of the house. He would give it for free if we would use his services for managing the property, a no brainer for expats who didn’t really understand the minutia of living here, much less managing tenants and maintaining an older home.

Ewan also knew something about negotiating a sale price! Suffice it to say we bought it for less than we were prepared to pay thanks to him.

I am forever grateful.

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