to buy or not to buy...

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Procrastinator333 wrote: »

Until we start viewings, maybe I am being naive, we will see.

I think Naive is the wrong word. But once you start the viewing and buying process, you may well realise it's not as simple as you'd thought, for a variety of reasons.

But for example, in a slightly different search area to the one we are actually looking at, the same thing is true:

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/map.html?locationIdentifier=STATION^8918&insId=1&minPrice=250000&maxPrice=500000&minBedrooms=3&secondaryDisplayPropertyType=detachedshouses&radius=5.0


Not sure if link will give criteria - Sutton station (surrey) within 5 miles, 3 bed detached, £250k-£500k. 368 houses.

Sure there will be plenty of duds, but I just can't believe that out of that kind of starting position there will only be 2 or 3 that work for us.

One thing that immediately comes to mind is that almost nobody in the real world starts a search with a buying price spread of 250K to 500K.

When deciding to buy, most people will know exactly how much they have decided is a comfortable amount for them to spend on a house, and be determined to get the best house they can within a much smaller range.

So if you can afford to spend 300K, and like what 300K will buy for you, you'll pretty quickly figure out that anything listed at 200K is a waste of your time in that area, and anything listed for 500K is just never going to drop their prices that far and is also a waste of time.

So for example if the budget is 300K, a similar search of properties within a 5 mile radius of Sutton, Surrey, for 3 bed detached houses from 250K to 350K (allowing for 50K in reductions at negotiation time)....... returns just 17 results.

A similar search for 3-5 bed detached houses from 450K to 500K in that area returns just 6 results.

And the difference in types and size of house is fairly dramatic. Again, in the real world, most people would either be looking for the sort of house you can buy in a particular area for 500K, OR be looking for the type of house you can buy for 300K, but almost never would they be looking at both options as suitable for their circumstances because the difference in property type and size is just too large.

If you're happy with what you can get for 250K, then there is no need to spend 500K. If what you want costs 500K, then you won't be happy with what's on offer for 250K. There is a reason houses are priced the way they are. As anyone who has bought a house will tell you, the difference between what 250K will buy and what 500K will buy is pretty big.

Cleaver

Procrastinator333 wrote: »

But for example, in a slightly different search area to the one we are actually looking at, the same thing is true:

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/map.html?locationIdentifier=STATION^8918&insId=1&minPrice=250000&maxPrice=500000&minBedrooms=3&secondaryDisplayPropertyType=detachedshouses&radius=5.0


Not sure if link will give criteria - Sutton station (surrey) within 5 miles, 3 bed detached, £250k-£500k. 368 houses.

Sure there will be plenty of duds, but I just can't believe that out of that kind of starting position there will only be 2 or 3 that work for us.

My wife and I are really unfussy buyers. We were looking in the Manchester area and were happy to consider any region with good transport links. We had no particular house in mind - something with character, large kitchen, a garden and that was about it. No kids, so 2+ bedrooms was fine. Would consider terrace or semi, old (preferred) but new also fine if it ticks boxes. Didn't mind if it had a garage or not. Top budget of £200k if we found something amazing, but wanted to spend around £170k. If it required work fine, but equally okay with one pretty much finished as long as the sums added up.

We spent about 6 months looking at 2 or 3 houses a week and didn't find anything we liked. Boring house after boring house after boring house. They all had something wrong with them and I was left thinking that if we're pretty unfussy, then god knows how 'normal' people buy a house.

We spoke to a lot of people who wanted area x, it had to be a 3-bed semi, had to be new, had to have a garden, can't be north facing, needs an office room, can't be on a busy road, needs to be within catchment areas of schools x and y and can't have a yellow front door.

Procrastinator333

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

One thing that immediately comes to mind is that almost nobody in the real world starts a search with a buying price spread of 250K to 500K.

I guess I'm not in the real world! :eek: Where am I?! :eek:

That is the exact search I use (alebit different area). I then just hoover up every 3 bed + detached house and save them for the time being.

There are a few reasons I use such a spread.

1) We are still not exactly sure what we want to do regarding number of days worked for my DW in a year or 2. If she does 5 days we can probably just about get to the £500k mark, we could never go over because of the additional burden the stamp duty would add.

2) Due to some pricing to sell and some going fishing, there are a wide range of prices for similar houses. There is one in my results that is £475k. It is a pretty small 3 bed detached new build. They are fishing (and have been for 18 months with no bites). There are others round the corner, larger for £350k.

3) I like to know how much I'm paying for each additional aspect of a house so to speak. I'm building up a picture in my mind of what I can get at each £50k mark between £250k and £500k. The question after that is then is that additional piece worth the £50k. I guess what I'm saying is I don't just want to know what is the max we can get for our money, I also want to know what each piece is costing us. Say 2 identical houses, the second has a garden twice the size of the first, that is the only difference. But there is a £25k price difference. I might be able to afford the bigger garden, but do I definately want it for that money. I appreciate it isn't that easy to compare, but that is the sort of picture I'm trying to build up and with that sort of number of houses I feel I'm starting to appreciate that.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Procrastinator333 wrote: »

I guess I'm not in the real world! :eek: Where am I?! :eek:

That is the exact search I use (alebit different area). I then just hoover up every 3 bed + detached house and save them for the time being.

There are a few reasons I use such a spread.

Where you are is not the buying stage.....:D

You're still in the research stage..... By the time you are ready to buy, you'll know what you want and my point will hold true.

1) We are still not exactly sure what we want to do regarding number of days worked for my DW in a year or 2. If she does 5 days we can probably just about get to the £500k mark, we could never go over because of the additional burden the stamp duty would add.

2) Due to some pricing to sell and some going fishing, there are a wide range of prices for similar houses. There is one in my results that is £475k. It is a pretty small 3 bed detached new build. They are fishing (and have been for 18 months with no bites). There are others round the corner, larger for £350k.

3) I like to know how much I'm paying for each additional aspect of a house so to speak. I'm building up a picture in my mind of what I can get at each £50k mark between £250k and £500k. The question after that is then is that additional piece worth the £50k. I guess what I'm saying is I don't just want to know what is the max we can get for our money, I also want to know what each piece is costing us. Say 2 identical houses, the second has a garden twice the size of the first, that is the only difference. But there is a £25k price difference. I might be able to afford the bigger garden, but do I definately want it for that money. I appreciate it isn't that easy to compare, but that is the sort of picture I'm trying to build up and with that sort of number of houses I feel I'm starting to appreciate that.

All valid points.

But as I said, by the time you're ready to buy you'll have narrowed the criteria, and thus the search, and you end up looking at a 100K spread at the most.

Cleaver gave a good example above, and I think it's pretty representative of most buyers experiences.

When you're ready to buy, you'll know what you want, and there won't be 300+ houses that meet the criteria. You'll probably be lucky if there are 30. And by the time you view them, it'll be a handful at most that you'd actually be happy spending your hard earned money on.

Procrastinator333

Cleaver wrote: »

My wife and I are really unfussy buyers. We were looking in the Manchester area and were happy to consider any region with good transport links. We had no particular house in mind - something with character, large kitchen, a garden and that was about it. No kids, so 2+ bedrooms was fine. Would consider terrace or semi, old (preferred) but new also fine if it ticks boxes. Didn't mind if it had a garage or not. Top budget of £200k if we found something amazing, but wanted to spend around £170k. If it required work fine, but equally okay with one pretty much finished as long as the sums added up.

We spent about 6 months looking at 2 or 3 houses a week and didn't find anything we liked. Boring house after boring house after boring house. They all had something wrong with them and I was left thinking that if we're pretty unfussy, then god knows how 'normal' people buy a house.

We spoke to a lot of people who wanted area x, it had to be a 3-bed semi, had to be new, had to have a garden, can't be north facing, needs an office room, can't be on a busy road, needs to be within catchment areas of schools x and y and can't have a yellow front door.

I'm not really in a place to comment, but it seems a little contradiction that you "are really unfussy buyers" but then "they all had something wrong with them"

Did you find one in the end?

Cleaver

Procrastinator333 wrote: »

I'm not really in a place to comment, but it seems a little contradiction that you "are really unfussy buyers" but then "they all had something wrong with them"

Ha ha! Yes, that's a pretty good point.

I guess what I mean is that maybe you can assume that each average couple or individual will consider around every 1 in 100 houses as having potential for them to buy. I think these days you can use websites like Rightmove to potentially go through a lot of houses without visiting them (for example, one of our stipulations was a house with a large kitchen, so Rightmove can be very useful for seeing houses with small kitchens).

If we assume that an average buyer(s) would consider every 1 in 100 I guess an unfussy buyer would maybe look at 1 in 50/60 as they don't have as many conditions. A really 'fussy' buyer (probably the wrong word, but you know what I mean) may only be able to consider 1 in 200 houses.

I guess my point is that I think we had a pretty open mind when searching for a house (multiple areas, would consider many types of houses, not fixed on number of bedrooms etc.) and it was still very difficult to find somewhere. Most houses are average, overpriced and not really that appealing for one reason or another. The few that aren't are snapped up very quickly, no matter what the doom-mongers on here will have you believe.

Procrastinator333 wrote: »

Did you find one in the end?

We did thanks yeah. And I'm pleased to say that we're really happy here.

Cleaver

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

When you're ready to buy, you'll know what you want, and there won't be 300+ houses that meet the criteria. You'll probably be lucky if there are 30. And by the time you view them, it'll be a handful at most that you'd actually be happy spending your hard earned money on.

This is what we found. In each area we looked at there might be 200 houses in the price bracket we were interested in. Which sounds great. After looking on Rightmove maybe 50 of these would by the type of house were were interested in at first glance. Maybe 20 or so would have an internal layout (room numbers, large kitchen, number of bedrooms etc.) that was acceptable to us after a closer inspection. Out of these 20 maybe 5 would be on nice roads and near the transport links that we required, so I'd ring the agent to book to look at these 5.

Because everyone wants nice houses in reasonable locations at good prices, 2 would normally be sold or as good as. We'd look at the other 3 and hope that one of these would make us go "ye gods, this is the place that I'm willing to take out a massive loan to buy", but invariably none of them were.

Frustrating business, and it's the reason I smile when I read on here that people will only offer 25% below asking as "there are plenty of places out there." There are plenty of places out there, but very few that you'll want to buy. And, guess what? Lots of other people will want that place too. So when you've spent 6 months trudging around loads of places during your evenings and weekends and then you finally find something, you really do want to get the best deal but you're also thinking to yourself whether you want to spend another six months looking. Suddenly your 'I'll put in a cheeky offer' mentally goes out the window when you realise you've finally found something you love.

All just my experience by the way.

LydiaJ

My experience agrees with what Hamish and Cleaver are saying.

As Hamish has said, what you are doing at the moment is the research phase, and the range of houses you are watching makes sense for this phase. When I started watching houses, I wasn't ready to buy. My financial circumstances were uncertain and I didn't know what my budget was going to be. I was watching houses over a huge range of prices (£150k to £350k). I had a friend in another town who was interested in my search and wanted me to send her links to the listings of houses I picked as possibles. I was sending her lists of 15 houses at a time, despite already having decided about the "catchment for school X but not the flood zone bit of it" criterion.

Last November, as many of you know, my financial circumstances suddenly and unexpectedly changed beyond recognition. I became a serious buyer at around the time I'd expected, but with a lot more money to spend than I had thought I was going to have. I stopped looking at the cheaper houses, and concentrated on the ones that I felt I could love, rather than the ones I thought I could manage with. I found that looking in a higher price bracket meant there were lower volumes and fewer houses to choose between.

I viewed a few houses and found that items that had been on my "desirable" list had somehow found their way onto my mental "essential" list. I think initially I'd had some sort of sub-conscious idea that being fussy was "bad" and being unfussy was morally superior. And of course in many areas of life that's true and it's great to be flexible. I am trying right now to teach my son to accept birthday presents with a grateful attitude rather than a fussy and critical one. However, I came to see that house buying is not like that. There's nothing wrong with wanting something specific, knowing what you want and trying to find it, as long as you're realistic about how much you can afford to spend and what you can reasonably expect to get for it.

I also think different people's requirements create different viewing habits. Cleaver wanted a house with character and didn't like many that he viewed because they were boring. Character is something that you really have to view the house in person to judge. I'm not surprised that he describes being able to whittle it down quite a lot with RM, but needing to go and view a lot of houses before he found the right one. Most of the things I wanted were things that it's dead easy to tell from a decent EA's listing plus a bit of messing about with online maps - school catchment, aspect and orientation of the house, room sizes, layout etc. So I've actually been to see a much smaller number of houses, just because I could eliminate so many more without needing to be there. Moreover, viewing houses is probably less convenient and more stressful for a single parent like me who has to take two lively kids along, than for a childless married couple like Cleaver and Mrs Cleaver.

The house I'm now buying is the best house for my family's purposes out of all the houses I have looked at over the last 2 years - on RM or in person. I thought that as soon as I saw it on RM, and I still thought that when I went to see it. I am thrilled to have agreed a price for it and happy that I didn't proceed with any of the large number of "yes it's nice but..." houses that I've looked at over the last couple of years.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

LydiaJ wrote: »

My experience agrees with what Hamish and Cleaver are saying.

.

Great post.

And your thread on the trials and tribulations of house buying over on the other place should be required reading for anyone that thinks they'll have hundreds of suitable houses to choose from when they are ready to buy.

DervProf

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

And by the time you view them, it'll be a handful at most that you'd actually be happy spending your hard earned money on.

That doesn`t sound like a shortgage to me.

I`m probably missing the point, but having a choice of "a handful" sounds like a surplus to choose from.