Mortgage Free - so good they'll do it twice! Wynnvegas aiming for the big house

elegant_elephant

Hi. I just wanted to say that this is my favourite MFW thread. You are an inspiration and as soon as I work out how, I will subscribe!

wynnvegas

Hi L,

Plucked it - back in the game!!

Cheers,

Billy

Tilly_MFW_in_6_YRS

Ooooooohhhhhhhh nnnnnnnnoooooo

Now you will get ten back!

wynnvegas

Hi Elegant Elephant (brilliant name by the way!),

Thanks for popping in. I'll put you down for an advance copy of "BTL - My Part in Billy's Big Breakdown" then!? Chapter two has taken a few more twists and turns today. I will endeavour to get a bit of a write-up sorted before bed.

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Hiya Tilly,

Right, that's it! It's the just for men bulk buy tomorrow!!

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Evening All,

Things have gotten crazy! So crazy that, had you been peering through the squalour window yesterday evening, you would have quite literally seen me jumping for joy - I'll digress slightly to paint the picture a little more fully.

We had, at last official count, 5 houses valued at £95k, £95k, £85k, £80k and £70k and five accepted offers respectively sitting at £76k, £76k, £68k, £63k and £50k. All things being equal, we were getting a few pretty decent deals and everyone, if not happy, was pretty much content with their lot from the various dealings.

Enter, in fine pantomime villain stylee, the surveying company. Bearing in mind that, in West Lothian, house prices in the last year have generally risen by a monumental 0.2%, I was fully anticipating the home reports to be reflected in the re-valuations. Rule #1 in the BTL game - assume nothing!

What we then had was a valuation set of £88k (from £95k), £85k (from £95k), £82k (from £85k), £65k (from £80k) and a valuation to be done for the £70k property. That's a collective drop in four houses of £35,000 in the space of an average of six months. Needless to say, our offers then didn't stack up at all and my fear was that the housing market was pretty much crumbling around us with no apparent reason.

Enter pantomime villain number 2, the IFA! (if anyone is interested, I'm playing the jovial part of buttons in this production...) My initial conversation with him led me to understand that the surveyors were deliverately, potentially even under instruction, knocking the prices down in a big way to satisfy the needs of the lending banks. In that I thought the banks would be after as low an LTV as possible, this didn't make the slightest bit of sense to me. I puzzled and worried about it over the weekend, got the lawyer involved and sat down with the Financial Advisor on Monday to see what the hell was going on. At the end of that discussion, I decided that I would chuck in revised offers based on 80% of the new valuations (nothing really to lose at this point). My main worry was not that we would suddenly go from five houses to none (although that was a close second!) but that, to walk away at this point, we'd potentially be £1,250 in the hole to the IFA, £1,500 in the hole for mortgage booking fees and £3,000 in the hole to the lawyer for conveyancing fees with nothing more than a bit of experience and wounded pride to show for our efforts. This was the point where the grey hair was noticed!!

Cue yesterday. Property 1, having had their offer reduced from £76,000 to £70,500, came back and agreed to the reduction. I very near fell out of my chair. Property number 2 came back to say they would consider the offer of £68,000, down from the initial offer of £76,000. Clearly folk are pretty desperate to sell. We've got a reserve property in mind at the moment so dropping one of these five isn't a big issue so things were looking up.

To today. Property number 4, the one initially valued at £80,000 came back at £65,000 - a rquite ridiculous drop. We promptly chucked in a revised from of £52,000 (from an initial agreement at £63,000) which, to my absolute astonishment, they have now come back and accepted. We also have a bit of clarity on what the surveyors are up to and why they're doing what they are. It would appear that surveying companies are under a lot of pressure to build in extrapolated worst case scenarios as the banks are forecasting a big rise in mortgage defaults. The surveyors aren't bothered about getting the valuations wrong so much as they are about being ditched by any of the lending banks so they are being ultra negative. That leads us to believe that, in getting the 20% off the pessimistic value, we're probably getting a massive discount. We'll use a different surveying company in six months when we enter back into the mortgage to recapture our offset and it could well be the case that we have an extra £40k or so to play with at that point - that's another two houses able to be added to the mix in the summer!

So far, so good. We'll hear back on three tomorrow with a fourth up in the air a wee bit still. We're now very, very hopeful of having posession of our first two properties by the end of next week!

However, in the grand rollercoaster that has been January 2012, we could well be approaching an upslope...

Hope everyone is grand, dandy and full of the joys of moneysaving.

Cheers,

Billy

Froggy-G

Salut Billy! :j

What an update! I can't believe it..:eek:
At last you got your wish, and therefore it will make it so much easier to knock those BTL mortgages downs, and ease cashflow for the forthcoming summer purchases..

Did you celebrate Burns night in style?

Hope all is well north of the border?

Cheers
Froggy

waughc01

Wooohooo Billy, bargains galore!!!!!!
No wonder you found a grey hair after the last couple of weeks.
That will be some chapter in your book.
Keep us all informed of what is happening, after saying I won't be around this weekend I will now be popping in for an update.
Good luck
Waughc01

wynnvegas

Leana Froggy,

Burns night was fairly grand. We all drank the finest whisky, gorged ourselves on haggis, pranced around in our skirts and did a threw a few secret masonic rituals involving the odd goat for good measure. We actually had our Colin and his better half round for pasta and apple pie so nothing particularly out of the ordinary!

It's feeling like the end of part. 1 of the journey which is daft as we've actually only secured two houses to date but I'm a good bit more relaxed about the whole thing now to be sure.

Meeting Panto Villain 2 today at 3pm to go over the current state of play and next steps.

Cheers,

Billy

wynnvegas

Hi L,

So it would seem. I'm hopeful that we're very much on the right side of these deals now. I'm a bit miffed about the initial approach of "ah go on, just complete as it'll be alright in the end" approach from Panto Villain 2 when there was clearly both justification and opportunity to apply the thumbscrews that little bit harder. Doohnibor is a more robust and apt project title by the day!

Thankfully, the grey hair was merely metaphorical. If I start going grey in my thirties, I'll be having weekly appointments at the hairdressers. Shifting from a barber to a haridresser will be a big step mind!

Have a brilliant weekend. Keep your fingers crossed for three more yes votes from the poor!

Cheers,

Billy