Category: Housing

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Thirty years ago I met my now-husband and moved across the country for him. We only knew each other for a year before I decided to pick up my life to be with him, and I’ve never looked back. I love my family just as much as I love my husband, but I followed the possibility of true love and I’m really glad I did. I now live in Melbourne and the rest of my family live in Perth. My family comes to visit twice a year.

When my family visit they tend to stay for a month or so at a time, which we are all really happy about. However, seeing as we’re all grown adults we are all aware of the fact that we need our own space. When my husband and I built our house twenty-odd years ago, we decided to build a fully self contained pool house to go along with our house. That way my family could visit and live in their own space, and we could have our own too. It was a genius idea. 

As with everything over time, wear and tear happens. Our pool house is in the need of a few repairs including a door replacement. Melbourne homes are built by the best, but after more than twenty years, it makes sense that parts of our house and pool house need fixing. My husband and I are going to get everything in the house repaired before my family comes over next month. We both want my family to be as comfortable as possible when staying with us, especially because they’ve gone to the effort to travel over three thousand kilometres to be with us.  

Whilst we’re at it, we’re also going to get a sliding windows replacement in the main house, which is our home. We can afford it and we enjoy the finer things in life, so we are upgrading our current windows to stunning sliding ones. 

I was conveyancing before it was cool, as the kids are saying nowadays. Sixty years in the business, to be precise. True, things were a lot simpler back in the days, but also a lot busier. People were buying houses left, right and center, and sometimes in other directions as well. You could sometimes turn eighteen, and then poof…you get yourself a house, using the deposit from your paper round. That’s how my first husband got his first job, whereas the second inherited his family’s summer mansion when he turned 25. I forget…it’s been a while.

Anyway, the old and well-established game of conveyancing solicitors. Melbourne had only a few of us to begin with, back in the olden days. People didn’t really know what they were doing, to be honest; only that it was important. My third husband used to say that it was 90% intuition, and I’m inclined to believe him. But over the years we managed to establish a conveyancing empire that Melbourne can truly be proud of, and now whenever I walk past a ‘SOLD’ sign, I feel a warm glow. I made that happen. Me and my team, and whichever husband I had at the time.

I still think of properties in that way, and I’m proud of it. Even when I’m off on my holidays with my ninth husband, I still look at beach apartments and such and think about how they’d look on a conveyancing form. And of course, the job really helped me and my sixth husband find our dream home in Eaglemont. Exclusive properties around there, you know! I did conveyancing for a few properties there myself…and surrounding, affluent areas. People mostly left those to me. They always seemed a little bit intimidated, which is probably because I was the premier conveyancer in Melbourne. Rich, powerful, feared, confident…the industry just isn’t the same without me, really.

-Maureen

Sometimes things just work out perfectly, and this…this is one of those times. I’ve been interested in automation since, like, before I could even talk. Maybe it’s just being a part of my generation or whatever, but all of the toys my parents gave me were designed to keep a child occupied while the parents put their feet up. I had a phone with over 6000 unique phrases and animal noises, depending on which order in which you pressed the keys. Not sure I ever heard the same phrase twice.

And now I’m grown up a bit and everything is tablets, phones, watches that tell you when you’ve got a message, and whole jobs have been phased out in between now and then. So now that I’m in a first-year robotics course and they’re asking me to do a project on ‘automation’…well, this is my jam. I’m doing the entire thing on Lawrence Corp, since they seem dead-set on automating everything. Their latest project is an algorithm that finds people the perfect home for their budget, demographics, job, children, likes and dislikes. Apparently it’s going to be the first proper robotic property advocate based in Melbourne, because it’s inside a machine that people can talk to. Much like a real buyers advocate.

Personally, I’m not sure about that. I think the entire reason you go to a property advocate- or anyone in the industry, for that matter- is because you want a human touch. If I’m looking for a home and I don’t want any help, there are already a ton of search engines I can turn to, easy as that. But I don’t want to have to deal with all that paperwork by myself, and I currently do not trust a machine to do it for me. And, like, buyers advocates across Melbourne are there expressly FOR the human touch. They find you places and let you know if they’re suitable, and you trust them because it’s from a human person.

So basically, Lawrence Corp is giving me fuel for this entire assignment. I’ll take it.