Tomous wrote:Grumpy David wrote:There's a lot to be said for the Scottish method of buying / selling houses.
You get a Scottish Home Report which confirms the market value so you don't have the risk of the lender down valuing the home. You can buy over this amount but if it's say 200k value and you want to offer 205k but have a 10% deposit, it's 20k + 5k extra, rather than then the lender giving you 90% of 205k which does take some of the heat out the market.
It also is a Homebuyer Report, not the useless mortgage valuation report so you get a lengthy document to review. And it's much trickier to pull out of a purchase after your offer is accepted.
Plus they abolished the much hated leasehold almost 20 years ago. The UK introduced Commonhold around a similar time but it never took off (at the very least it should have been the required process for all new build blocks of flats) and virtually doesn't exist.
This all sounds extremely smart to me. What's the catch?
You can probably argue that since the seller has to pay for a Scottish Home Report to market the home (essentially an Energy Performance Certificate and Homebuyer Report) that this initial upfront cost might be off-putting to sellers so fewer properties come onto the market but you can also spin this as a feature, not a bug, since only serious sellers will pay it.
And with the leasehold replacement, it's arguably more fiddly (less so for houses turned into 2 flats) when you want to get communal maintenance or repair work done as you need a majority of flat owners to agree (unless essential repairs). So you potentially have the general upkeep being ignored until the problem becomes too big to ignore (and more expensive to sort compared to being nipped in the bud earlier) or something like ground floor flat owners complaining about being asked to contribute to repairs of the lifts etc. Even a modest block of flats might have 30 different people, but some of the new builds would mean hundreds of people communicating amongst each other.
The system basically eliminates Gazumping and also pretty much estate agents too since the conveyancing solicitor tends to market the property.