my buy-to-let dream cost me everything

dolce_vita

.........Not me, obviously, but this idiot :

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/mortgages/buy-to-let/article.html?in_article_id=424579&in_page_id=56&ct=5


A sad tale of greed and stupidity.

Rover

But how can this be? The market can only go up can't it?
Do you mean all these estate agents, advisors, builders, lenders have been ramping the market for all its' worth raking off commissions on properties that are worth far less than the price paid !!!!!
Outrageous - you'd think with their inside info they'd be dumping stocks and selling assets. Hang on, they have. That'll just leave the Great British public then................

super_dad

and then under his name he has fortune favours the brave!

if i offered you a £5 note and said give me £10 for it, would you buy my £5 note off me?
of course you wouldnt... so why pay £150k for a house thats worth £100k?

having worked in an estate agents for a short time a few years ago you can literally see the desperation on peoples face as they 'needed' to buy a home.

the agent goes to "number 22" and sticks £5k on the actual price of a house.. it would sell quickly... so when number 33 came on the market you may stick £7k onto the price.. my god.. it sold!!

right.. 2 months later.. £10k.. and these people are still buying. whats going on!?

Have a bonus, our boss would scream... bloody right have a bonus, we were making him a fortune.

re-arrrange the following .. print. money. license. to.

if it aint worth it then dont buy it. end of.

leftieM

That's such a sad story. That poor foolish woman. She saw others getting rich on the back of buy-to-let and she thought she could make some money too, and she could have if she'd known what she was doing. Instead she was ripped off and conned.
I think it's too easy to laugh at her plight and call her stupid but I'm guessing that she came from a background where people didn't have much money, didn't know how to deal with it and how to spot a con. So she was preyed upon by unscrupulous greedy scum. Disgraceful.

Rover

super_dad wrote: »

and then under his name he has fortune favours the brave!
if i offered you a £5 note and said give me £10 for it, would you buy my £5 note off me?
of course you wouldnt... so why pay £150k for a house thats worth £100k?

Why ask me Super Dad - I haven't.
I also see no contradiction in my post and the the strap line 'Fortune favours the brave'.
Since you posed a daft question to me, I'll reciprocate:
Would it be brave or foolish to buy now?

PasturesNew

I wonder why she bought property 3 and property 4 as 1&2 were performing so badly.

Rover

Probably had an advisor like SuperDad whose only mission was to re-arrange licence, money, print, to.

CB1979_2

i'm pretty sure it's this paragraph that gives it away!

Anne, not her real name, has been a taxi driver for most of her life. 'Driving day after day is long, hard work,' she says. So in January 2002, in a brave attempt to escape the daily grind, she parted with £6,000 of her precious savings to attend a three-day property investment seminar in London.

there says it all, if she's dumb enough to pay £6k (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) for someone to say you could make money on property then she was dumb enough to fail like she did, idiot.

nrsql

PasturesNew wrote: »

I wonder why she bought property 3 and property 4 as 1&2 were performing so badly.

Probably committed to the deals before she realised what was going on. Or just wouldn't admit that she'd made a mistake.

Part of me thinks she wasn't very bright to get into this without doing research - probably had all these people making money off the transaction telling her it was foolproof and thought they were her friends.

Other part feels sorry for her that she has been duped by these charlatans. Don't know who the original mortgages came from but they should have spotted the problem. Surprised that she managed to remortgage several times. Wonder what the mortgage rates were and whether that should have been a clue.

2003 value £170,000
current value £128,900

Taking too long to find actual figures but say 30% increase since 2003
means the property was actually worth about £100,000 when bought for £170,000.
(Suspect Glasgow would have more like doubled in that time so maybe £70,000).

Of course don't know the area the flat is in or how flats are doing there.
Suspect it was a luxury flat and people who could afford it wouldn't want to live in the area. Was gambling on the area becomming trendy and factored that into the price - well actually they probably priced it on the martgage that they could get for the inflated rental income so the figures worked out for the gullible.

dolce_vita

She is stupid. There's no two ways about it.
And as a 52 year old female taxi driver in glasgow she is, by definition, living a tough life.

But she has no debts, 30k equity in her own home and 6k in savings. That would have suited most people in her situation. But she got greedy.

And the shysters who set it all up for her are also part of the problem. They are one of an army of lying thieves waiting to trap such dreamers and chancers.

They probably told her that she could rent the flats to "young professionals".

Even if she knew nothing else about the market, did it not seem strange to her that these people wouldn't or couldn't buy these flats themselves and yet she could?

As I said, it's a sad tale of greed and stupidity and I anticipate many more in the coming months as the house of cards comes crashing down.

Romani_Ite_Domum

dolce_vita wrote: »

.........Not me, obviously, but this idiot :

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/mortgages/buy-to-let/article.html?in_article_id=424579&in_page_id=56&ct=5


A sad tale of greed and stupidity.

With the whole perception that "owning property is the road to riches" ( or just a better standard of living in this case) pushed down our throats for the last few years, I am not so sure she is an idiot, but more of a victim of a nationwide, goverment backed, property selling scam.

A minority of people have made money out of Browns " Miracle economy" the rest of us, it's illusionary.