Picking a Block

Jake wanted a really big block but I managed to talk him down to 1 acre (for budget and locality reasons). This would be big enough for our house, privacy, a pool, lawn and bush. We knew we wanted to move closer to Jake's work and decided on a budget of $ 300 000 maximum.
Most blocks seemed to be an average of 280, but there were some cheaper ones. Of course when a block is cheaper you have to ask why and it was usually because of the shape of the block and how flat it is. One block we considered was a triangle with a 127m frontage and on a slope. At first we thought we could deal with a block this shape, but upon learning about the 20m set back we are glad we decided against this one. We would have had no backyard.

When we showed up to the first proper meeting with one of our prospective builders he straight away told us about this perfect block for us that had just come on the market.
It already had an area cleared, fenced all the way around with established neighbours on both sides. Jake at first didn't really like the 'bush' as there was a fair bit of scrubby tea-tree but eventually came around.

As we were custom designing our house, the block had to suit the house. We didn't want to change the house to suit a block, so we got the prospective builder out to take a look. They said it would be fine. A couple weeks later we were meeting with a real estate agent to discuss putting in an offer.

Now the land was originally advertised as 270, but later changed to offers over 250. As we weren't in a rush and there were other blocks available, we were willing to negotiate hard. The real estate agent wasn't very helpful in giving advice on what to offer etc.
We went in with 240 knowing they wouldn't accept it but it would start the negotiations off with a lot of room to move. They came back at 260. We tried 249, 253 and 258 but they said they wouldn't take lower than 260 (why not just advertise it that way from the start right?).

We knew that as we didn't have a building contract and didn't want to rush into signing one, we wanted the longest settlement date possible (30 days being average). We initially went in with 90 days, but they never seemed to knock that back. So when they wouldn't budge from 260 we thought we would try a 120 day settlement. To our surprise they took it. So from 2 weeks ago, we have 120 days to work out a building contract and maybe even get approval to build from shire before we have to start paying a mortgage.  If all goes smoothly we could be ready to build by settlement (October).