Buying a house (and renting)

sawyerpip wrote:

Moggy wrote:

Tomous wrote:

Moggy wrote:

BID0 wrote:

Moggy wrote:

BID0 wrote:

Moggy wrote:

BID0 wrote:You should have your current place sold AND have a mortgage offered by a bank before you go looking at a house and put an offer in otherwise it can cause a chain to collapse.

Exactly, people should sell their homes and be living in the streets before moving to another place!

I don't know what that's meant to mean?

You don't move out until contracts are exchanged ready for the completion stage which normally takes 1-2 weeks for moving day.

You said we should have a place sold before looking at another property.

It's ridiculous to restrict viewings to people who already have an offer on the table. I understand people don't want to be in lengthy chains, but the process will fall down just as easily if people are not allowed to even view a property until they've got a buyer for their property.

An accepted offer is Sold - STC (subject to contract)

You have 2 offers for your property £200k and £201k. You accept the offer for £201k.
You then get the bank to credit check you to get your previously mortgage offer accepted for £80k.
You have a £281k budget and look at properties up to that price.

Yes I understand that.

Waiting until my property is STC is great for me. It's not great for my buyer though is it? "Thanks for offering to buy my property! I accept! Now hold on while I view 200 houses, take some time to decide where I want to live and attempt to get an offer accepted, cheers babes!".

You should already have an idea of where you want to live though and what your criteria is if you're prepared? Finding a property you want to buy isn't that long a process unless you have really specific requirements. Most people don't look at more than 5-10 before committing, we're talking weeks not months and months usually. The internet especially makes it very easy to find places.

I'll be moving 30 miles or more away from areas I am familiar with. I have some rough ideas of areas I'd like to look at, but would like to actually see houses (in the flesh, photos on rightmove aren't always a great guide) to narrow down where I decide to go.

I can understand not wanting time wasters, but it seems crazy to me to turn people away when you're trying to sell something.

I think with the market the way it is at the moment there's very little risk to agents turning away potential buyers. We're currently in the process of buying a house, and have been looking since the end of last year, and pretty much every house we viewed had near enough a full day's worth of viewings booked in within a day of first going up online, and most then had offers on within the week. I guess that might not be typical of everywhere but if you're looking in an area that's in demand then agents can afford to be choosy about who they arrange viewings with unfortunately.

Is that because of everyone trying to get over the line for the stamp duty holiday?

Yeah when you're moving house to a more distant location than just somewhere else within the same town then it can be annoying if estate agents are being dicks about things. When we moved from Cheltenham to Cardiff it was a challenge to get viewings lined up on the few days that we could travel over and some of the estate agents really didn't make it easier. "Sorry but can you do tomorrow instead?", "Can't you come later on today?" etc.

Ironically in the end we bought and sold via purple bricks and the whole thing was a million times easier than going through "real" estate agents.

Tomous wrote:

sawyerpip wrote:

Moggy wrote:

Tomous wrote:

Moggy wrote:

BID0 wrote:

Moggy wrote:

BID0 wrote:

Moggy wrote:

BID0 wrote:You should have your current place sold AND have a mortgage offered by a bank before you go looking at a house and put an offer in otherwise it can cause a chain to collapse.

Exactly, people should sell their homes and be living in the streets before moving to another place!

I don't know what that's meant to mean?

You don't move out until contracts are exchanged ready for the completion stage which normally takes 1-2 weeks for moving day.

You said we should have a place sold before looking at another property.

It's ridiculous to restrict viewings to people who already have an offer on the table. I understand people don't want to be in lengthy chains, but the process will fall down just as easily if people are not allowed to even view a property until they've got a buyer for their property.

An accepted offer is Sold - STC (subject to contract)

You have 2 offers for your property £200k and £201k. You accept the offer for £201k.
You then get the bank to credit check you to get your previously mortgage offer accepted for £80k.
You have a £281k budget and look at properties up to that price.

Yes I understand that.

Waiting until my property is STC is great for me. It's not great for my buyer though is it? "Thanks for offering to buy my property! I accept! Now hold on while I view 200 houses, take some time to decide where I want to live and attempt to get an offer accepted, cheers babes!".

You should already have an idea of where you want to live though and what your criteria is if you're prepared? Finding a property you want to buy isn't that long a process unless you have really specific requirements. Most people don't look at more than 5-10 before committing, we're talking weeks not months and months usually. The internet especially makes it very easy to find places.

I'll be moving 30 miles or more away from areas I am familiar with. I have some rough ideas of areas I'd like to look at, but would like to actually see houses (in the flesh, photos on rightmove aren't always a great guide) to narrow down where I decide to go.

I can understand not wanting time wasters, but it seems crazy to me to turn people away when you're trying to sell something.

I think with the market the way it is at the moment there's very little risk to agents turning away potential buyers. We're currently in the process of buying a house, and have been looking since the end of last year, and pretty much every house we viewed had near enough a full day's worth of viewings booked in within a day of first going up online, and most then had offers on within the week. I guess that might not be typical of everywhere but if you're looking in an area that's in demand then agents can afford to be choosy about who they arrange viewings with unfortunately.

Is that because of everyone trying to get over the line for the stamp duty holiday?

Yeah I think that's got a lot to do with it (we're hoping to get ours done before then to save £2,500), but it seems to me the demand has caused prices to inflate anyway so I wonder how much you're actually saving in real terms.

If you've seen the perfect house but are not in a position to put in an offer, be prepared for disappointment because there will be someone ahead of you with either cash deposit or house already sold STC.

Just looking or having mortgage offer agreed in principle is not enough atm because the demand is so high. That's why estate agents will turn you down because they will be able to talk to people in a better position to proceed.

Rocsteady wrote:Buying a place in a high demand area in Scotland is a strawberry floating nightmare though. I once bid 20% over the asking price for a property and still wasn't the top buyer.

How's that any different to being outbidded in England though?

Unless in general the Scottish Home Report valuation leans way too conservative in the valuation? Which goes back to "it's a bug, not a feature / it's a feature, not a bug".

Cause the alternative would be in England that the offer gets accepted but the lender's surveyor doesn't agree it's worth 240k and says it's only worth 200k.

That buyer with 24k deposit expecting to borrow 216k then either has a near hopeless chance of the seller agreeing on a price reduction of 40k in order to get the 90% LTV mortgage the buyer planned or suddenly needs to massively increase the deposit (easier said then done), or meet somewhere in the middle or bail on the purchase and start looking again. You could also apply to a different lender and hope their surveyor doesn't down value the home but no guarantee that it doesn't just delay the inevitable.

I thought in England the general expectation is you pay at, or below, the asking price? In Scotland 90% of the time it's a blind auction as 'offers over'.

Rocsteady wrote:I thought in England the general expectation is you pay at, or below, the asking price? In Scotland 90% of the time it's a blind auction as 'offers over'.

It's fair to say that offers tend to be closer to the listed price and 20% over asking would be incredibly unlikely in England but you aren't aware of other buyer's offers so it's still a blind auction.

The issue with over heated markets is the Scottish Home Reports keep it simmering instead by forcing the buyer to front more deposit rather than the lender getting involved too which reduces systemic risk.

In England, the inability to know in advance what the professional surveyor's valuation is means that the estate agent's valuation and the eventual agreed sale price can differ from what the lender's surveyor values the home at which creates the annoying varied outcomes mentioned previously of which the only good one for the buyer is the least likely (a price reduction to match the mortgage valuation).

You do get OIEO (offers in excess of) on some houses in England but it's usually related to wanting the home to fall into specific bandings on rightmove and zoopla e.g list at 400k OIEO to show at max 400k budgets rather than listing at 405k and being on page 10 since the next banding up is 425k.

Big day today, my estate agent is hosting an "open day". We've got 12 people booked in to view today!

Fingers crossed for cash buyers getting into a bidding war.

Grumpy David wrote:In England, the inability to know in advance what the professional surveyor's valuation is means that the estate agent's valuation and the eventual agreed sale price can differ from what the lender's surveyor values the home at which creates the annoying varied outcomes mentioned previously of which the only good one for the buyer is the least likely (a price reduction to match the mortgage valuation).

Interesting, both times I've bought a place the professional surveyor has just valued the property at exactly the agreed price. I took this to mean that they hadn't really 'valued' the property but were just confirming that they thought the agreed price was reasonable (i.e. not a risk to the lender).

Surveyors often lag behind market values a bit, but not usually by much so it's rarely a problem. If the buyer has enough of a deposit, banks generally don't turn down mortgage offers with minor down-valuations.

Moggy wrote:Big day today, my estate agent is hosting an "open day". We've got 12 people booked in to view today!

Fingers crossed for cash buyers getting into a bidding war.

When we bought our current place we had the survey come back valuing it below what the sellers were trying to get for it (funnily enough the surveyor thought it was worth what we originally offered them, obviously my valuing skills are top notch!)

As a result the mortgage lender reduced the amount they were prepared to lend and so we had a stressful time where we needed to negotiate a reduction in sale price with the seller and at the same time find a way to increase our deposit to cover the short fall. Not fun!

There were a few cancellations but 9 people ended up viewing.

Feedback seems positive, there are a few that it sounds like they are keen. One idiot commented "we are looking for a garden", probably best not to look at 1st floor flats then....

Estate agent called me to say he thought it was positive, he thinks a few might make offers and if not he'll do another open day.

Fingers crossed!

Looking for a garden

Had an offer come in. Not for asking price, £7k ABOVE asking price.

I'm strawberry floating buzzing. If it sells for that then I have all sorts of options of where to buy and what sort of house I can get.

Jesus, I assumed you also put asking price over what you thought you'd get as you figured people would haggle you down, too?

Niiice

Aww yeah.

That's not a growth wrote:Jesus, I assumed you also put asking price over what you thought you'd get as you figured people would haggle you down, too?

It's weird how money messes with your brain. Just a few months ago I would have bitten off the hands of anyone offering £20k less than the asking price we went for. Now anything less than asking price sounds unacceptable

I just spoke to estate agent and he told me another offer just came in, this one for the asking price. He's suggested I do nothing for 24 hours so I can think it over and we can wait and see if any other offers come in.

Wow!!