Wanting to buy at £250k, what should I view?

claire80

we are currently buying for 249 990 and the house was up at 280. It had been around all year and there are several others all in the same price bracket so made it easier i guess. We also offered on one up at 275 and the estate agent said they would take 249 990 ( we offered less as it wasnt as nice as the other one ).
I guess it depends on the market in the area you are looking in .

phoebe1989seb

It also depends on how desperate the vendor is to sell, although with the market apparently rising maybe this is a whole lot less likely than when we were moving two years ago. We were looking to buy a serious renovation project (with no mortgage) allowing plenty of cash left over for the work to make it habitable.

One house we looked at (Grade 2 listed and in a pretty terrible state) was originally on at £400k. It was being sold by a divorcing couple, the husband having already set up home with his new partner elsewhere in the UK. By the time we viewed it was down to just under £300k, having been on for well over a year. Our offer of £248k was accepted and when we later pulled out (pre survey) it went to auction with a £200k guide. It failed to sell. A year or so later it sold on the open market for £182,500 :eek: When fully restored it will be a £500k house.

Back then we were looking at houses up to 300k with a view to paying around £250k in order to keep £100k+ back for necessary building work.

theGrinch

I would direct EAs that you are interested to view anything where the vendor is likely to accept less than £250k as you will stay under the SDLT threshold jump

alwaystryyourbest

Hi I am wondering this same thing,but we have seen a house we love priced at £289.995 not sure what to offer it has been on the market for 3 months..thinking of offering £270 but wondering if that starting price was to high ??

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

I_have_spoken wrote: »

Now the market is moving ahead, knocking anyone back from above £265k is pretty unlikely unless they are desperate to sell. .

Agreed.

And by next spring a lot of these houses currently on for 265K and getting 250k at sale, will have pushed up towards 285K asking prices and be getting 270K at sale.

The window is closing for bargains around the stamp duty thresholds.

This time next year it'll be the smaller, cheaper, crappier, houses currently 20K or 30K below that threshold that are sitting on it.

Tancred

song_of_calliope wrote: »

We're hoping to soon be in a position to buy and would like to find something for £250k due to the jump in stamp duty for anything beyond that. So what should my cut off price be for viewings as we don't want to waste anyone's time. Before this whole help to buy thing I was thinking up to £280 and then offer the £250 but not sure that's realistic now as prices are rising. We're in the northwest. What would you do? Thanks.

In the north west you still have a good chance of buying a house for £250k when priced at up to £280k. Good luck.

Tancred

harrys_dad wrote: »

Yet another short term bribe to gain votes from over-inflating the housing market. All that will happen is that sellers will not reduce prices as they know the tax burden has been reduced. So, a simple transfer of money from tax to vendor, ridiculous.

Rubbish. Why do you expect every house price to be reduced on request? You don't haggle over the price of a fridge or a TV at Currys, do you? Why should houses be any different?

Tancred

benson1980 wrote: »

280k is a good figure search-wise. We have been extensively looking at houses just over the stamp duty. Asking price of 265k we found generally means they want 250k. Anything above this they want more. There are several houses priced at 275k that we looked at- where they've been on the market a while and the people were in a hurry to sell we found the EA would indicate that 250k would seal the deal, but generally with the nicer houses that were clearly worth more than 250k people were generally refusing to budge.

Can you afford to go over? If you're willing to go just over into the 260-265k region you'll find that this pretty much eliminates all the competition and you may get a comparative bargain. Our max budget was 250k initially but we found that going a little bit over got us a lot more house.

A lot depends on the desirability of the house. A bog standard Victorian terrace is unlikely to sell above £250k unless there is something special about it.

LandyAndy

You can never tell what people will accept. Relatives of mine put their house up fairly recently for £310k (Seriously overpriced). After no interest they dropped to £285k and have just accepted £250k (which is what I thought it would go for to begin with).