Buying with David Wilson

Amybetty

Hi All,

I've been trawling through posts about David Wilson Homes/new builds/part exchange etc for the last few weeks. I thought I'd post some information about where we are at and get everyone's thoughts. I've heard all the negatives about new build, and to be honest I know that there can be problems, but we also know a few people who've had new builds and its all gone perfectly and they are very happy with their homes... so we are happy to go with a new build (I used to have a different MSE name with an old email and can't for the life of me find the details hence my new one...)

We are living in a two bed Victorian terrace and while we still like it it has a downstairs bathroom, a very steep stair case, and only a tiny paved yard and we feel that it wouldn't be the best place to bring up kiddies... so we've decided to move.

Unfortunately we bought at the peak of the housing market, so we are going to take a hit on the selling price... having spoken to some EAs we have ascertained that our own guesses about value are about right... but the length of time to sell is a case of "how long is a piece of string?". We had already considered a new build and one EA even suggested that part-exing would actually be our best bet!

We have some savings and have looked into mortgage options. We know (depending on how much we get for our house) we can either get a 95%LTV or 90%LTV mortgage - Our salaries more than cover the repayments.

So we've been into David Wilson, seen a home we like, and have arranged for them to come over and see what they want to offer (they took £250 for this... is this normal?- I insisted that it was written on the agreement that this would be refunded if we were unhappy with the part ex figure). So we are now waiting for the valuers and will meet them again next week to see what they will offer - the sales rep suggested they would be flexible on the offer price and the asking price of the new build.

We are looking at a property that is £210,000. Did some research on the land registry and some of the same type on the same development sold for £185-190k in Aug 2012, and £195-200k in Aug 2011 (though these probably didn't use part-ex...)

So what would you do? How would you start the negotiations? Has anyone else been in a similar position... how did you get on?

Cheers

martinsurrey

the only figure that really matter isn’t the part ex price, its the price to move, so don’t fall into the trap of doing 2 negotiations (one for the part ex price, and another for the new build price), get them to give you the price to move.

For example

They offer you £50k for your house but the new build will only cost £140k – price to move = £90K

They offer you £110k for your house but the new build will be £210k – price to move = £100k.

Obviously the first one is better!

They will more than likely want to keep the sales price of the new build high (so it looks like prices are rising on Land Registry), and be flexible on the part ex value of your house.

Amybetty

Thanks Martin,

Unfortunately we couldn't get the deal we wanted... they offered too little for ours and wouldn't budge on the Part ex price. They said policy was to bring the price of their house down but not go up on the value of the part ex...

Unfortunately that wasn't going to work for us as we are reliant on some of the equity in our house in order to make up the deposit. We needed another 5k for the part ex to make the deposit up... the equivalent would be getting 50k off the purchase price which was never going to happen!

We had to walk away... back to the drawing board!