New house search - not easy!

murphydog999

Never mind 'how long did it take you to sell?' what about 'how long did it take you to find a new house?' What did you compromise on?'

It's not easy this buying houses lark, really time-consuming, especially when you are re-locating and don't know the areas that well.

We sold our house a month ago and am finding that
1, estate agents pictures really 'big-up' room and garden sizes, so it's very disappointing when you get there.
2, people refuse to negotiate on property that is obviously overpriced, been on the market for donkeys years, or needs work - that they can't see needs doing.
3, everything we like is over our budget!! (thats our problem, no-one else's, by the way )

spadoosh

1. when viewing houses take note of sizes of rooms that you think appropriate/suitable for you then before viewing other houses compare the room dimensions with what you think is ideal

2. check how long the property has been on the market, if its been on 12+mths these people are very unlikely to negotiate alternatively speak to the esate agent before viewing about the vendors position could help you decide if its worth viewing

3. 2 options with this one, 1) win the lottery 2) lower those standards!!


How are you not finding it fun?! I loved looking for our house though tbf its our first one so had never been more excited in my life. Your looking for your new home and by the sounds of it isnt going to be far away from a new life (new area etc) thats got to be exciting.

Alternatively look at other ideas, think outside the box!

Have fun!

Jangin

What area, budget and requirements do you have? I think buying is the fun bit and selling seems impossible. What about renting and getting to know the area better. You will get to know and dodgy roads etc.

Mrs_Egg

I completely understand your pain! We've only been actively looking the last couple of weeks but I am already loosing the will to live. We are lucky in the respects that we're keeping our currently house to rent out so there isn't a chain or a rush as such but EA photo's are SO misleading...

sten_super

We are FTBers, and despite our insistence that we wouldn't get carried away, and would spend time looking at the market before committing, we took just over 3 weeks between starting to look at houses and putting an offer in on one (the first one that we'd seen 3 weeks earlier!).

We ended up compromising on kitchen size - the Mrs wanted a big kitchen (we have a large one now in the house we're renting), but after viewing half a dozen it quickly became apparent that her/our aspirations were completely unrealistic. The house that we are in the process of buying has a kitchen 10' x 8'. However it does have a 4th bedroom (garage conversion) that wasn't in our initial requirements.

Our general experiences mirrored some of those above - it was very clear that a lot of sellers weren't willing to sell below the price that they had in their head, regardless of the (lack of) interest in their property at that price. We identified very early on (after the first weekend of looking round properties) the areas that we wanted to live in, and while the small number of properties available in these areas (in our price range!) limited the number we could look at somewhat we saw enough to decide that there was one that was priced to sell (it turns out that the vendors have in fact already moved out and have a bridging loan), of a good quality and filled our requirements.

fannyanna

I sympathise as we had the same problem. Thankfully we found somewhere and we're in the process of buying it now.

Work out a short must have list. For us it had to be a house, had to have 3 bedrooms (with the 3rd not being a box room), a decent size garden and had to have a driveway or potential to put one in.

Then work out an ideal list. I'd say the property should have at least 75% of the ideals and the rest you need to learn to compromise on.

cattie

I was quite lucky as when I accepted an offer on my house, I knew there were 2 properties on the market that I was interested in. I went to view them, discounted one and made an offer on the other one, which was accepted. It's an empty property, so no chain there and my buyer is in rented.

Bedrooms are slightly smaller than I'd ideally like, but place is spacious elsewhere and really all I could hope to find in my favoured location.

Viewing just 2 properties before finding the 'one' is a world record for me, as in the past I tend to view in the region of 30 properties. I looked at 28 before buying my current house. If only house buying was always this easy and straightforward!

mummybaker

We are in exactly the same position. We need a four bed but due to the mortgage market we arent sure we can get to the right price range for the ones we want. I think were about £25k out :-( Typical.

I'm finding it hard as I keep thinking if were stretching the budget to the limit already then going for something which needs a lot of work where will we find the cash to do it.

It's so hard finding a place now. Then there is the dilema of "do we look before weve sold" We had a buyer round this week and was told he's incredibly keen and a cash buyer and is now viewing everything else but comparing it to ours as a standard he wants. So it all sounds good but theres no offer on the table so I cant tell what I have to go looking with.

It's so frustrating. Bring back being a FTB I loved it then.

Better_Days

We are struggling too. Have been looking for a year now :eek:

But....there really is not much coming on the market in this area, and there are a fair proportion of those that have been on the market for ages due to unrealistic AP. Plus my needs are specific due to my ill health, although we would be happy to extend/adapt where possible.

I am trying not to lose heart and we have expanded the area in which we are looking which has thrown up some more possibilities. Going to look at one this afternoon, another tomorrow, so fingers crossed. Dang just got a phone call, the one we were going to look at tomorrow has been sold.:(

DH would live in a shed so I have to keep focused on the balance between what we need and what we would like.

scottishgirl87

In a similar situation. We've been looking since the beginning of the year (FTBers) but have seen absolutely nothing of interest since about May time!

Also, like you, everything we like isn't within our budget or the wrong area

phoebe1989seb

We sold and bought last year and were taken by surprise at receiving an offer we happy with within only two weeks of going onto the market which meant we were suddenly expected to find our next house (our 6th purchase) relatively quickly as our buyers and the chain above were working to a short time-frame.

The short time-frame suited us too as we were desperate to move from that area, but as we were once again moving to a new area (200 miles away) and we had a long wish list of criteria to try to fulfil, we knew it wouldn't be easy!

I had been making a note of potentially interesting houses for a couple of months prior to going on the market, but there were very few that ticked more than half our 'requirements' boxes, despite our search area being wide - within 70 miles of Portsmouth. We did however manage to find a house that seemed to fit the bill a couple of days after we'd accepted the offer on ours, but soon realised it was too small - we had downsized in 2007, but were now looking to upsize again slightly, lol - so we withdrew our offer and began searching again.

The second house we found was Grade 2 listed and in need of major work - not issues in themselves, but we were unable to ascertain if works carried out by the current owners (a divorcing couple which didn't help) had been done with LBC, then we discovered plans to build new homes directly overlooking the rear garden, which was already compromised by having the village pub next door with their outbuildings encroaching into 'our' garden, so we again walked away.

Finally - about four weeks after accepting the offer on our own house - we found a suitable property. It was empty, had been to auction previously but not sold, was unmortgageable due to its current condition and despite wanting a project, involved far more work than we had expected.......all internal walls stripped back to bare stone, no floors in some rooms, no electric lights in half downstairs rooms, unsafe staircase, no kitchen as such etc etc. It was also positioned on an 'A' road, but it had masses of potential, a garden to die for, over 2000 square feet of interior space, lots of ORP and wasn't listed despite being a very attractive period house.

After a bit of negotiation we had an offer accepted and completed on our sale and purchase just over a month later