First-Home Buyers: Hafsah and Rahman Mahmoud forfeited a dream honeymoon and designed a house instead

This week in First-Home Buyers, Queensland couple Hafsah, 24, and Rahman Mahmoud, 23, reveal their honeymoon plans getting scotched provided an unexpected chance to achieve homeownership. 

Hafsah, a school teacher, been tracking the construction and decorating process on Instagram: @our.kaiya.in.everleigh

“We moved into our house towards the end of November last year. Now we are currently finishing off all the other jobs we had lined up, putting in more furniture and décor items.

“Our process started in September 2020. My twin sister and her husband were also looking at the same time as us, and they had found a really nice piece of land, and we wanted to look in the same area, too.

“But by the time we got there, there was barely anything available. But we heard about Mirvac’s Everleigh, at Greenbank.

“As soon as I realised there were only three pieces of land left, I said, “yep! I had better check this out ASAP’. I went – even my husband wasn’t there – and I put the deposit down. I knew this would be a great starting point for us.

“We had started saving in early 2020. We had intended to go on our honeymoon – because we got married in 2019 – but we were working, and we hadn’t really saved that much money for a honeymoon.

“So we pushed it to the back. At the end of 2020 we planned to go on our honeymoon to Europe and then COVID happened, and we couldn’t.

“So, we thought, ‘why don’t we start looking into buying a house?’ At the time we were renting a townhouse with my twin sister and her husband, so it was a lot easier to save as well. And when we realised that we needed to save a little bit more, we said, ‘we need to stop renting’, so we moved in with Rahman’s parents and we stayed there until the end of our build.

“We were really lucky in that regard. We just paid for our groceries and anything we really needed. We really amped it, stopped going out, only got the necessities, and had the bigger picture in our minds.

“By the time September rolled around we had enough to think, ‘yes, we can do this’.

“The banks really took a long time and at one point I thought, ‘we are not building’. We were part of the First Home Loan Deposit Scheme, with a 5 per deposit, through NAB. It was quite tedious to get through that process.

“We had a broker do that for us, and in April 2021 we settled on our land, and then we could put in our notice of construction starting, and our house started getting built towards the end of May.

“I went out every single week to see it being built. Every Friday, after school, to see the progress, take pictures and a few videos. The first time I went I Facetimed my whole family because I was so excited – ‘This is my piece of dirt. This is where my house is going to be’.

“Honestly, it has worked out so well for us. We entered into the market just at the right time.

“Our build took six months, in total, which is what we were expecting, and we got weekly updates from our site supervisor.

“I look back on those pictures when we picked up the keys and it was such an unreal moment. I couldn’t believe that we were the owners of this house – we had designed it, had it built for us, and it was all ours.

“I never thought that I would have a house. It never crossed my mind that I would be a homeowner this soon, but we worked really hard to get where we were, and it was the best feeling ever.”