Chapter Twenty-Three: The Five Estates

Botanica, at Kialla. Secret Valley Estate, at Bylands. Oak Valley Lakes Estate & Resort, at Townsville. Bendigo Vineyard Estate & Resort. Melbourne Grove Estate, at Mount Cottrell.

Say them out loud. Every one is a small poem.

Secret Valley. Vineyard Estate & Resort. Melbourne Grove.

There was no vineyard within a country mile of most of it, and there was never going to be a resort anywhere, and the naming was done in an afternoon by two men and a bottle of wine — and in terms of return on time invested it was the most profitable four hours in the history of Australian property marketing.

The mechanism

Plainly, because the reader is owed it:

A buyer does not buy land.

This is the point everybody misses and the point the brochures worked hardest to obscure. The buyer buys an option — a right to acquire a lot, at a price, at some point in the future, conditional on the development proceeding.

The development proceeding requires rezoning.

Rezoning requires a planning authority to agree.

The planning authority has, in several of these cases, no intention of ever agreeing — and in at least one case had already said so in writing before a single option was sold.

So the buyer pays forty thousand dollars for a piece of paper whose value is entirely contingent on an event that will not occur.

And the money — this is the part that matters — the money does not sit in trust awaiting that event.

It flows out. To marketing. To project management fees. To related entities.

Into the hedgerow.

Marion

She rang the office every quarter for three years.

She was always polite. She was, by the accounts of the two former staff who remembered her, the single most unfailingly pleasant complainant on a list of hundreds, and that is somehow the worst detail in this entire book.

"I'm just wondering about the rezoning, love."

"It's with council, Marion."

"It's been with council two years."

"These things take time."

There is one call that a former receptionist remembered for a decade, and it is the reason Marion Dalgety exists in this novel.

Marion said: "I'm not ringing to be a nuisance. I know you can't do anything. I just want somebody at that end to write down that I rang."

And the receptionist, twenty-three years old, sat with the phone against her ear in an office in Southport where six other people were making outbound calls about a new project in the Pilbara, and she said:

"I've written it down."

She had. She wrote it on a pad.

The pad went in a bin on Friday.