Does anyone want to join me waiting to find a house to buy?

kilby_007 wrote: »

We've got a fairly rigid set of criteria (we're Kirsty & Phil's worst nightmare) so we're quite limited. Whenever a property comes up I check things in the following order:-

1) Check the area - we are looking at 4 quite specific areas in the catchment of good schools and near to the villages, so this further reduces the pool of properties.

2) Satellite view - how big is the garden in relation to the house - is there potential to expand and still have a good sized garden, workshop and greenhouse?

3) Floorplan - is it workable? We saw a property last month where the photos looked lovely but the floorplan was contrary (triangle and 'L' shaped rooms and botched extensions) so we knew it was a write off (although as we were desperate we did view it, just confirmed our thoughts!)

4) Value for money - taking the above into account.

5) Flood risk. This was the subject of considerable research with our most recent viewing.

6) Photos - quite low down on the list and we take very little notice of them because they can be vastly misleading (wide angle lenses allow you to see the whole room or garden but also make them look astronomically large!) but sometimes careful scrutinisation will flag up something major which you can then check out when viewing.

Ultimately the satellite view rules out an awful lot of houses for us due to the plot size which is why it's so high up on my list when searching. To answer your question, there's a couple of properties that fall into the "maybe" category that we could go and see, but they are vastly overpriced and in need of renovation, so it feels like a pointless exercise because we'd need them to come down 15-20% to make them worth the effort.