Buyer's Despair - London Property Market!

MGCP

Any other buyer's out there despairing at the current surge in London property prices? Another failed bid today - OIEO £400k, sealed bids and the accepted offer was in the £490's apparently.

Everything is suggesting that properties are going for more than asking, and far more than they did when the last prices were recorded at the Land Registry so there is no way of judging accurately what anything is really worth. It's like a feeding frenzy out there at the moment and all the while we are watching inflation eat away at our hard earned deposit!

Feeling very glum!

Strapped

Really? You have >£400k to spend on property and feel glum? Move out of London and commute!

MGCP

Yes, believe it or not when you've lived in a place for over a decade you can get quite attached to it and so the thought of moving out to escape the current buying frenzy here does feel rather sad.

Budget isn't really the problem, we are happy to cut our cloth accordingly but how can you make a sensible judgment in a market where the process is - open house on Saturday, multiple offers on Monday then sealed bids that may go 25% above what the property appears to be worth. God knows what a lender's valuation come out at.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

MGCP wrote: »

what anything is really worth.

Is only ever what both a willing and able seller and a willing and able buyer can agree is a price they will transact at.

MGCP

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Is only ever what both a willing and able seller and a willing and able buyer can agree is a price they will transact at.

Is that what you tell the lender when they refuse to lend at the price agreed because they believe it to be grossly overvalued?

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

MGCP wrote: »

Is that what you tell the lender when they refuse to lend at the price agreed because they believe it to be grossly overvalued?

And yet to quote, well, you.....

properties are going for more than asking, and far more than they did when the last prices were recorded at the Land Registry

And the reason why....

It's like a feeding frenzy out there at the moment

Obviously there are people willing and able to buy at higher prices.

And people willing to sell at those prices.

So the value has been established via price discovery in the open market.

MGCP

And yet there are lenders refusing to accept this. If they did it would at least solve one problem.

The other problem remains though, The only recorded figures available appear not to represent current selling prices in London (often by a quite unbelievable margin). Without access to information from which to draw reliable estimates it has become a lottery out there. This wouldn't be such an issue in a traditional negotiation as you can get a genuine feel for what a particular property is worth but in an environment where sealed bids are the norm all you can do is stick a finger in the air and guess.

martinsurrey

Strapped wrote: »

Really? You have >£400k to spend on property and feel glum? Move out of London and commute!

I'd be glum spending £400k on a house outside London to then spending 1h30 door to door commuting (3h a day) to then do 10 hour working days to pay for it!

makeyourdaddyproud

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Is only ever what both a willing and able seller and a willing and able buyer can agree is a price they will transact at.

Absolutely, the OP might not have the mythical £490k the house sold for but someone somewhere does. So long as there's cash sloshing in banks, and the early generation homeowners start dieing off. The inheritance feeding frenzy will only make matters worse.

Basically, if you were wise enough to buy early when no-one cared or were not so avaricious (pre 1979), you and your decendents are set for life.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

MGCP wrote: »

And yet there are lenders refusing to accept this. If they did it would at least solve one problem.

-The market is rationing goods in limited supply through price, exactly as it's supposed to.

-People complained that lenders needed to be more cautious and lend less, so that's what they're doing.

Where that leaves us is that easy availability of credit, the great equaliser between rich and poor, has been curtailed.

So property wealth will continue to consolidate in the hands of an ever richer percentage of society.

It's not fair.... It's not supposed to be fair.

It's supposed to be the allocation of assets based on ability to pay.

And as long as the credit famine continues, then the ability to pay for the ordinary person will be less than for the rich or those with inheritances.