Considering pulling out of a Barratt's purchase

nidO

dgtazzman wrote: »

We are currently in the process of purchasing a Barratt home. It's 3-bed priced at £210,000 and is around 1360 square feet. We got flooring, stamp duty and turfing thrown in. Everything was going smoothly, Barratt's was very helpful etc., until the mortgage valuation came back at only £195,000.

This is, unfortunately, why negotiating on price is often better than "extras" - Barratts have only agreed to pay your £2100 stamp duty because that's within their negotiating budget (ie the "premium" they're charging you for the house) whereas your valuation is the actual value of the house (ie excluding the negotiable premium barratts have slapped on the house).
Chances are, no flooring, turf, or stamp duty paid would have equated to a potential 10 - 15 grand you could negotiate off the price of the house (from experience with other developers, the amount they charge for flooring, as a paid extra or negotiable freebie value, is H-U-G-E).

dgtazzman

Not the case I'm afraid, we negotiated on the extra's as they would absolutely not move in the slightest on the price. Even the extra's they didn't really want to give us everything we asked for, but we held fast and got them.

Even the other houses that were 'sold' and now have come back up for sale are still listed at their old prices, they haven't reduced the prices in the slightest, while it's obvious they'll need to if they want their potential buyers to get a mortgage for them.

Lord_Baltimore

Money is always an issue of course (we wouldn't be here otherwise!) but you also need to ask yourself "where is it that I want to live?"

dgtazzman

Both houses are about 500 feet apart and we want to live in that area as it's a very convenient area for us, so that's not an issue in this case. The Barratt home is more to the back of the area, so slightly less traffic, but there's not a huge amount of traffic in that area anyway.

rochja

Trust the valuer. We pulled out of a new-build that fell down on valuation and it was the best thing to do in the circumstances. At the moment builders are trying to maximise income on the back of a mini boom caused by Government incentive schemes. Over the last couple of years they have all had extremely poor cash flow situations. Barratt are one of the more hard headed builders and will do everything they can to extract as many pounds per purse as possible. If you buy an overvalued house it will take longer to reach a break even point on resale with a consequently larger risk of being caught by rising interest rates and possible budgetary problems

SuzieSue

makeyourdaddyproud wrote: »

I would like to know how many of the board of directors at Barratts live in the home built by them or indeed any property built in the last 40 years, for that matter.

It's funny you should say that. When I was looking around a Barratt's show house around 15 years ago, the sales person was telling people that one of the Barratt's directors was going to buy one of the 6 bedroom houses on the estate. Strangely enough when I spoke to the person who actually bought it they had nothing to do with Barratts.

danielley

I would offer to buy the house for £190k. If they will not accept that then I would walk away.

Good luck.

ps I would justify the £190k instead of the £195k valuation as a security blanket as you are jittery about the value of the house and subsequent resale value.

dgtazzman

After doing much more research over the weekend, we consider the 195k to be a fair valuation. Smaller 3-beds are around 190k new and 180-190k second hand in the area, so an extra 5k for the extra square footage seems realistic. We valued this higher, but this obviously doesn't factor in as heavily as we thought it would. I guess a 3-bed is at the end of the day still a 3-bed.

Phoning Barratt's in the next hour or so to drop the bomb, have talked to our sols and put the process on hold and our IFA is on standby to port over the mortgage if it comes down to it. Negotiations with Keepmoat are ongoing, but looking good.

harrys_dad

Good luck OP, seems the right decision.

GlynD

harrys_dad wrote: »

Good luck OP, seems the right decision.

I agree.