After hearing horror stories from the live-in caretaker who proves to be a hoarder, do you buy the place anyway, because the complex is so full of interesting stories?
The photos of the former Hotel Waratah on the Great Western Highway in Parramatta used by real estate agents to advertise for-sale or for-rent rooms converted to studio apartments don’t do the former hotel’s dilapidation justice. It is obvious they use photos from when the hotel was still a hotel, some time ago now, catering to salaried sales reps and wedding guests attending the Waratah function centre next door.
Up-to-date photos would have shown weeds growing unchecked on the roof of the hotel’s concrete portico and also the two car wrecks used to block access to, and prevent illegal parking in, the concourse.
In the lobby, the shiny black baby grand piano, chipped in places and badly in need of tuning, is still there, a left-over from the glory days.
Apartments (formerly rooms) 27 and 29 were advertised for sale with different real estate agencies.
What, I asked myself, could be better than owning a studio apartment in Parramatta for accommodation during the week? It would be an investment at the same time as a place to stay.
27 was shown to me by an Indian real estate man who was shaking his head all the way from the lobby to the second floor apartment’s front door.
“You will not be believing in the state in which this studio is in, sir. The tenant, sir, is being having mental issues. It is difficult, sir, but you should be making an offer based on the conditions that are existing, sir. It can be turning out to being a very, very savvy purchase. Very savvy.”
The tenant couldn’t remember the appointment but let us in anyway, the real estate man dolorously shaking his head while negotiating entry. Then she took up a sullen position on a ripped lounge.
All the damage that could have been done to the room had been done, including broken floor tiles and a de-railed balcony door with cracked glass panes. I gave inspection of the bathroom a miss.
A day later, 29 was shown to me by a second real estate man. This ‘studio’ was completely intact, with apparently nothing having been changed since the Waratah’s conversion. Down at heel but functional. Even the bed and the hotel reading lamps were still there.
But the tenant, who continued his video-gaming during the inspection, clearly didn’t believe in letting fresh air in from time to time. Or daylight for that matter. “Kill the motherfucker!”, he shouted intermittently, but this was merely to other, online participants in the game he was playing online.
29, I decided.
Air.
Light.
Lick of paint.
All that was needed.
I met the building manager, a tall, obese, balding, bearded man in his thirties, outside the building. He was in dispute with a group of workmen digging trenches and laying internet cables. He was threatening them with a “class action”. They had cut through the concrete of the Waratah’s circular driveway.
“Steffan”, he introduced himself. “You the guy buying 29?”
I confirmed I was the guy.
“You sure you want to buy 29?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?
“ ‘cause it’s next door to the mental nutcase in 27 is why. She screams at night, and she threatens to kill people.”
Steffan had a point, of course.
“The guy in 29 told me that you didn’t look like a Parramatta person”, Steffan said. He didn’t say whether he agreed or not, and I didn’t ask.
It turned out that Steffan himself was the bachelor owner-occupier of the Hotel Waratah’s former bridal suite on the top floor. He took me up to it.
Far from the madding crowd but cluttered.
Car tyre rims here and there.
The real stand-out was an outboard engine fitted to an empty, galvanised steel tub and counterbalanced with a lump of concrete tied to the tub’s far side.
Then there were several computer monitors from the 80s, stacks of newspapers, plastic buckets with stuff, and everything interspersed with newspapers, builder’s plastic and plastic bags.
On the kitchen table at which we sat stood some plates to which fossilised food rests clung, and there were countless empty Nescafé and Mocona instant coffee jars.
On the seat of a kitchen chair lay a Qantas cabin bag from the 70s with a half-decapitated teddy bear sticking out.
Steffan told me about the problems in the buildings. The drug dealers. The people released from jail after having gone to jail when the Waratah Hotel had still been a hotel and wanting a room there when they got out. The people who stole electricity by plugging into power points in the corridors.
He then showed me an apartment on the third floor at the back, away from the traffic on the Great Western Highway, and “fully renovated”.
By Steffan.
He was selling it for a mate who had lived there after his divorce, but who had since retired and moved to the Philippines, from where he was sending Steffan pictures “of the people he meets and what he does with them”.
So Steffan renovated apartments, drew a salary as building manager and brokered tenancy leases and apartment sales in the building. This represented a dizzying construct of conflicts of interest.
However, perhaps this was also the key to managing and resolving them effectively. There were so many conflicts of interest that it was impossible for Steffan to keep track of them all, so they sort of vanished into thin air altogether.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was very tempted to buy the studio Steffan showed me, but eventually good sense won out, and I gave the Hotel Waratah a miss, although I look at it wistfully every time I am stuck in traffic in front of it on my way to the place I eventually bought.
There were so many stories there.
