House hunting in Berkshire

Tancred

Gentoo365 wrote: »

All the areas you mention are on the Reading --> Waterloo commuter line. As well as being near the M4. There is a premium for this.

In addition a lot of the employment will be private sector, and a lot of the residents will be people located their due to their employment. When the recession hit it may have been the case that there was a lot of movement initially. As people changed jobs and were made redundant. This has all happened now. In fact private sector companies are now recruiting again.

A sample of one individual is not really relevant, however the reason I am not selling my place is that I would like to move nearer to London. However the prices in London are increasing faster than the prices in Berkshire. So I am unable to make the move.

Also I have notices that prices have been drifting upwards somehow, so there is a temptation to see if they get to the pre-2007/8 levels before selling.

Asking prices are certainly moving upwards - and this has hit me hard as I've been pegged to the £250k mark due to the SDLT threshold business. I could always wait another year but there is no guarantee that I could sell my house for more and prices of houses in general will continue to rise.

I could never live in London even if I wanted to (which I don't). Maybe if I won the lottery jackpot.

g_attrill

If you are casting a wide net then possibly you might be missing the best ones because the agents will call people on their client list first, and perhaps only list it online if nobody immediately makes an offer.

Obviously the problem is that if you put yourself on agents' lists then you will get called about anything and everything and they might lose interest if you don't do lots of viewings.

[Deleted User]

Tancred wrote: »

Parts of Bracknell are extremely expensive - the outer areas. The inner part of Bracknell isn't very nice at all.

We could look at Camberley/Farnborough but my OH doesn't want to move too far out.

Far out from where - London? If so, Farnborough really doesn't take much longer on the Basingstoke to Waterloo line than Bracknell or Wokingham do on the Reading to Waterloo line. Both are tedious because they stop everywhere...

onlyroz

Farnborough to Waterloo is about 45mins on a week day with about four stops in between. Longer at the weekend because it stops at more places.

ultrarunner

Wokingham will be one hour, Bracknell just under an hour. Crucially both stations will guarantee you a seat at peak times, the train is usually full by Ascot however.

InMyDreams

g_attrill wrote: »

If you are casting a wide net then possibly you might be missing the best ones because the agents will call people on their client list first, and perhaps only list it online if nobody immediately makes an offer.

Obviously the problem is that if you put yourself on agents' lists then you will get called about anything and everything and they might lose interest if you don't do lots of viewings.

Well that's the biggest argument for vendors not using a high street agent if ever I heard one. Why on earth would a vendor accept an offer without advertising it to the masses? I guess if there are agents pushing vendors to do this then it does make sense as a buyer to sign up with them.

I think whatever area you are in (assuming property is actually moving, which you say it is) you will always get the impression that everything in your price range is not good, because at any given time, most properties will have been on the market for a while because the properly priced ones won't hang around long. Your option is to either wait for new, properly-priced properties to come on, or view ambitiously-priced properties that have been on a while and make low offers on those instead.

twink22

We are looking in exactly the same area, we viewed 6 houses on saturday including a 4 bed detached for £280,000 in Sandhurst which i had high hopes for but and it was tiny inside, the rest were overpriced and either small or needing a lot of work, saw a lovely 3 bed semi in Camberley today and its been sold already! We rent a lovely large 3 bed detached house so are a bit spoiled for space atm which isn't good when viewing smaller houses!

Our MIP is for 300,000 but we only want to go up to 280,000, but I can't find anything I like in that price range, I won't go to Farnborough or Aldershot though so it narrows it a bit for us.

Tancred

[Deleted User] wrote:

Far out from where - London? If so, Farnborough really doesn't take much longer on the Basingstoke to Waterloo line than Bracknell or Wokingham do on the Reading to Waterloo line. Both are tedious because they stop everywhere...

We both work in the Bracknell area. My OH has a widowed mother who lives in Henley and she is an only child, so feels apprehensive about being far from her mum.

Tancred

twink22 wrote: »

We are looking in exactly the same area, we viewed 6 houses on saturday including a 4 bed detached for £280,000 in Sandhurst which i had high hopes for but and it was tiny inside, the rest were overpriced and either small or needing a lot of work, saw a lovely 3 bed semi in Camberley today and its been sold already! We rent a lovely large 3 bed detached house so are a bit spoiled for space atm which isn't good when viewing smaller houses!

Our MIP is for 300,000 but we only want to go up to 280,000, but I can't find anything I like in that price range, I won't go to Farnborough or Aldershot though so it narrows it a bit for us.

You have my sympathy! Most of the detached houses we've seen priced at under £325k have very small bedrooms and often no separate dining room or even dining area. We've resigned ourselves to having to do a garage conversion once we buy and this is really frustrating because we would lose useful storage space, but the alternative is not having enough room for all our furniture. Our current terraced house has 92 sq m with no garage, but houses we've seen only approach that space when you include the garage.

onlyroz

Does it have to be detached?