Original Mango Hill couple Merv and Joan share their memories of buying off the plan at Seasons Mango Hill almost 10 years ago.

While Joan and Merv were both aspiring to stay living in their own home as they got older, they were getting nudged by family members to look around at downsizing.

“We’d been ‘told’ by family that we should look at somewhere to retire to. Our response was we don’t want to, we want to stay in our home until they can cart us out of there,” says Merv.

When Joan’s daughter spied an advertisement for Seasons in the local paper, Joan says Merv was particularly elusive when it came to taking a look. She finally convinced him to go for a drive one Saturday.

“We found ourselves at Seasons Kallangur and I asked if this is where the units are for sale and the lady there said ‘yes but it’s not here, it’s at Mango Hill.’ She told us all about the concept and we thought it sounded pretty good,” says Joan.

“We could stay together! My sister had to go into a nursing home and be separated from her husband and we didn’t want that.

“They had a beautiful model of the community and they had it on this big table and you could see where the rooms were. The two-bedroom unit I liked already had a hold on it. As they sold 30 of the 88 units on the first open day.

“I spent the weekend writing down questions and talked to the family about it. We went back on the Tuesday and I asked all my questions and they were all answered satisfactorily and so I said, ‘what about that unit I really liked?’. The sales lady said, ‘are you prepared to put a deposit on it’ and I said ‘I’ve brought the chequebook’ and she said ‘It’s yours’ because the people that put their name on it hadn’t paid their deposit within the week.

“We say we’ve got the best one in the whole place!”