Who would live there? Stories of people living in undesirable homes

Where do you draw a line when it comes to buying a house? Can you be persuaded to buy a house with no garage, or without a nice outlook?

What about a property where a violent crime was committed or the traffic is so loud you need earplugs to sleep at night?

Everyone has looked at a house and wondered why someone would choose to live there, and it’s no surprise that stigmatised properties usually sell at a reduced price.

Rob van der Veen bought the bank and old bank manager’s house in Snowtown, South Australia in 2012.

This year it’s been 20 years since John Bunting, Robert Wagner, James Vlassakis, and Mark Haydon killed 11 people, some of whom were stored in barrels of acid in what is now van der Veen’s bank vault.

“We use the bank for storage at the moment, just boxes we need to get rid of and my cat sleeps in there all day,” says van der Veen. They choose to live in the four-bedroom house, which is a lot quieter than the bank.

“We get tourists out the front. The family gets out and takes selfies and line their kids up,” he says.

Tourists visit the bank every day. “Sometimes I talk to the tourists and they get a bit embarrassed if I come out. I say it’s fine, don’t stop.”

Van der Veen isn’t superstitious but has noticed that strange things happen around the house.

“We had a few things go missing and all of a sudden they just turned up. A set of keys went missing when we were renovating the kitchen. All of a sudden the keys were sitting right in front of us on the brand-new kitchen bench,” he says. If there is a presence, he considers it a positive one.

He enjoys where he lives and doesn’t ever regret the purchase. “It wasn’t an expensive property when we bought it, a four-bedroom house, plus it’s a bonus having a bank with a big room at the front where we can put our stuff,” says van der Veen.

Michelle Wilson also doesn’t regret purchasing her property on Old Canterbury Road at Dulwich Hill, Sydney. “The cars move 24 hours a day,” she says. “There’s a cement plate on the road out the front of our house and we hear the ‘dd, dd’ sound all night.”

The road is 10 metres from her bedroom window and the traffic lights are 500 metres up the road. “Sometimes the traffic banks up quite heavily in front of our home,” says Wilson. “At the moment I have a semi-trailer parked outside my house.”

The noise and light from the cars have affected Wilson’s sleep. “I sleep with earplugs in. It’s loud.”

The property was bought through a family agreement and was cheaper than other houses in the area. “I don’t regret moving into this area at all. I like the cafe and food culture and there’s a park across the road,” she says.

David Ford was living at Marrickville, five kilometres from Sydney airport, before the noise drove him out. “They were really low. When we were watching the news on the telly, a plane would come over and drown it out,” says Ford.

While Sydney airport has a curfew between 11pm and 6am, planes fly over Marrickville outside the curfew. In March this year, the average daily movement of flights above Marrickville was 236.

Noise monitoring stations for that area recorded aircraft reaching or passing the 70 decibels mark up to 202 times every day on average in March. This is about as loud as a vacuum cleaner or a hair dryer.

“They were a lot louder than a vacuum cleaner,” says Ford. “After a while you don’t notice it, but on a sunny weekend when you invite people around and a plane takes off, everyone stops and looks at it. ‘Oh yeah, we have a big plane flying over our house.’ ”

The president of the Real Estate Institute of Australia, Adrian Kelly, once sold a property that squatters were living in for 30 years.

He says, “from a real estate point of view, those sorts of properties are the best ones because they are different. They aren’t the run-of-the-mill sort of property. In terms of marketing you can be really up front with people. It all comes down to price.”