Buying on New Build Estate

ina_pickle

Hello

I am currently looking at buying a new build house direct from the builders and there is a number of blocks of flats on the site (quite near to the house plot I am looking to buy) which have been given to a local housing association to manage and are general needs rented accomodation.

I wondered what peoples thoughts where on buying in this situation.

I personally dont see it as a bad thing, if anything the positives i see is if there is any problems with messy gardens noise etc then you have a landlord you can talk to about it. At the moment I live on a all privately owned estate and some of my 'owning neighbours' are awful and when I have tried to get help from the council, there has been very little there as they are owners and can do what they want on their land, is the councils opinion. So an owner can dump rubbish in their garden for months and noone touch them on it but if rented then you could just hassle landlord until moved:D

does anyone have any more indepth opinions on this matter, anyone stay in a mixed tenure new build estate?

will it effect the house value in anyway? I know people can be put off when you say rented houses are near by but as my experiences of owners has been so bad anyway im not jumping to any conclusions that this is a bad buy just for that reason.

thoughts please!!

thank you

vectra90

I wouldnt do it, i've managed to rent the new build we wanted to buy and it is on a newly developed estate and we have been completely put off of buying it now. A few of the properties around us are social housing and it just ruins it with the riff raff that are now 'hanging about' and getting upto allsorts. This is just my view, your situation maybe different for you.

smileytiger

I live on a cul de sac where some are owned and some are HA rented.
When i first came here to live (over 16yrs ago) some of the HA tenants were a bit noisy and there were lots of children - some quite unruly.
The HA were very quick to deal with any problems and any nuisance tenants were evicted.
It's now very quiet & really lovely place to live and most of the people (owners & tenants) have been here as long as i have.
However i don't regret buying my house even though the early days had a few issues as we've been very happy here. Our house is now on the market as we're downsizing. We've had a lot of interest so it's not putting too many people off - but i'll hold my breath til i've actually sold maybe;)
I would never stereotype anyone purely because of their housing status & I've seen plenty of owned properties that have untidy gardens and unpleasant owners.
Good luck with whatever you decide.

IHateDida

vectra90 wrote: »

I wouldnt do it, i've managed to rent the new build we wanted to buy and it is on a newly developed estate and we have been completely put off of buying it now. A few of the properties around us are social housing and it just ruins it with the riff raff that are now 'hanging about' and getting upto allsorts. This is just my view, your situation maybe different for you.

Same happened to me but unfortunately I bought. There was no consideration for owner occupiers (and as the gardens were so small for the HA properties, they treated the whole of the communal areas as their own gardens - when you have 3+ children per house and more on the way, complete with rubbish etc), HA didn't want to know as there was "no much they could do, the tennants had already been moved on from somewhere else blah blah", council didn't want to know either. In the end I thankfully sold (at a loss!).

I have learnt a very valuable lesson, I'm sure it works out for some, but it certainly didn't for me and I am not willing to take the same risk again. And whats more....as the developer couldn't sell some of the remaining houses, more than the original allocation went over to HA - and this is something else they don't tell you! Personally I would avoid, and put my money into a more established area (preferably non estate, along a road where you don't get so much "hanging around") where little or no further development will occur. Good luck - hope you make the right decision for you.:)

PasturesNew

My sibling bought a house which, looking at the off-plan layouts, would mean she was opposite what we thought was a "block of social housing flats" - oh the fear I had ..... now, it turns out, you don't really notice that they're flats, the people in them are actually private tenants and there have been NO incidents, worries, troubles whatsoever anywhere on the whole (mixed) estate.

Actually .... I couldn't become my sibling's neighbour as the price of these privately rented flats is WAY out of my price budget.... and about 50% higher than LHA.

Rented can mean "posh" too.

ina_pickle

hhmm that's interesting so quite negative experiences then. thanks for the comments.

I was just thinking not to write it off as my current house is in a fully owned estate and its the pits, all the houses need repairs and noone spends the money looks so tired, whereas having a council or housing association presence at least means repairs and upkeep get done or at least you have someone to complain to if they don't.

my current next door neighbour owns his house, had a pile of crap in his garden taller than a bonfire so ugly and council said nothing they can do as its on his land and they can only get involved if it was rented, as it would have been a breech of tenancy.

that's my feeling anyway, i work for a housing association so i know how things work so im pretty confident that if i had problems with neighbours I could get them sorted out.

IHateDida

ina_pickle wrote: »

my current next door neighbour owns his house, had a pile of crap in his garden taller than a bonfire so ugly and council said nothing they can do as its on his land and they can only get involved if it was rented, as it would have been a breech of tenancy.

that's my feeling anyway, i work for a housing association so i know how things work so im pretty confident that if i had problems with neighbours I could get them sorted out.

I wouldn't have minded the rubbish quite so much but when there are 10+ kids screaming outside your house at all hours of the day and night (from my experience the HA kids that I came across didn't go to bed very early - despite being toddler age upwards and were hardly ever supervised!), and communal areas getting vandalised, the HA was pretty useless. I hope yours is better but do go in open minded. It might be worth visiting the area at all times of the day and night to see what its like. Don't just think its the appearance of the area - sometimes you can be more affected by the noise and behaviour of who you live with.

Hope it works out - but do your homework properly!

AMO

Everyone knows that any new building site has to encompass a certain amount of social housing if larger than a number of houses (I think 19).

Look at how they've put the social housing. Some house builders aren't very smart and put all the social housing together and the kids from those places clump together and are a bad influence to other kids and because many of them have parents that are just as bad, you can't really just knock on their doors and say their kids are causing trouble.

Also, a tip for buying a new house from a builder. The roadnames wont be registered against Zoopla, but the post codes will be. Ask for the postcodes of the house you are about to buy and zoopla the sold prices. Print off the list and then cross reference against the plots by going at night to work out which plot is which house number to see what other people have paid. Also take into consideration what builders may have thrown in for free for you - carpets etc.

In genral you should be able to knock £10 off at least if you're paying by cash and insist that they raise the value of the part exchange by £5K more than what they've offered.

Finally, going at night will enable you to test the tone of the atmosphere and determine whether you are likely to get trouble there.

ruggedtoast

I wouldn't buy one unless the estate was properly finished and I could walk around and see what it was like.

One of my friends rented on one of these and it was pretty bad. About 2/3 were sold to OOs or btl landlords, the remaining third were empty or given to HA tenants.

What was sold as an aspirational young professional estate near a train station close to London, quickly degenerated into a dodgy high crime estate ruined by chavs. The unsold remained unsold and the OOs were stuck in negative equity.

The builders then decided it wasnt worth putting any more money into it so didn't finish a lot of cosmetic work, or bother putting in the shortcut footbridge to the railway they promised, further reducing property values.

Eventually the chavs figured out that the OOs were at work during the day and everyone started getting burgled.

99% of people on the waiting list for council housing are perfectly fine decent people, however there is very little social housing available now and what there is seems to be prioritised to the other 1% over everyone else.

teajug

I am sure the people that are renting will not mind you purchasing the property next to them they are all humans after all....

ina_pickle

thats a good point about the amount of kids that may be left to run around, however the flats are all 2 beds only and mixture of mid rent and whenever I have drove round both day and night there is noone to be seen its a really quiet development. The flats all have their own parking round the back of the block so wont have to worry about them parking near us.

They have also built a small play park which seems to be the norm in all new build developments its surrounded by a grass area, and again i havent seen many kids in it. Its also two streets away from house we are looking at so dont think we would hear them anyway and as we are looking at a house two streets away.