Accepted offer on my house but can't find a house to buy.

inner_grace

I accepted an offer on my house last week to first time buyers. My worst nightmare has come true, there is nothing suitable to buy. I put my house up for sale because I want to move into a 4 bedroomed property but there's nothing available in the area I want to buy or even a 3 bed property that can be extended to make it 4 bedrooms. My search is limited because of schools. Maybe I am worrying a little. Is anyone else/has anyone else been in this situation? How did things work out for you in the end?

copperjar

Same happened to me. I was honest before accepting that we hadn't found anything and would potentially need a couple of months max. Put a bit of a self imposed timescale on it. Was getting a bit stressed when the two months was looming but our buyers weren't pushy. We found something within the couple of months in the end which we love.

Honesty best policy we found - they should probably know you've not found anything yet.

Rambosmum

Is your buyer in a chain? If they are they may be less willing to wait.

We've just had this, offer accepted by us on 8th Nov, then 2 purchases fell through, 2 offers rejected and houses taken off the market then nothing else suitable. We've eventually (as in 3 days ago) had an offer accepted, fingers crossed this works. Our buyer has started putting some pressure on us and we do risk losing him. Our house sold quickly initially so we aren't too worried.

househunter7

We sold our House towards the end of Nov / Beginning of Dec, and only this week (Mon), did a suitable house come onto the Market, which we both wanted. There were others that ticked most boxes, or were not quite worth the asking price in our eyes.

If you know what you want, I wouldn't stress about it. Worst case scenario is you do not find a home and your buyer looks elsewhere.

Although you lose the sale, it is better than buying a house just because it is the best of what's available on the market, or over paying and stretching your budget. Otherwise you may end up regretting it later on.

Davesnave

I think this is a common scenario when the area is narrow and the purchase parameters, tightly defined.

When we wanted to move in middle life, our neighbours offered us first dibs on their house, which we disliked for various reasons. They'd ripped out anything that resembled a feature, so the whole place was emasculated and not 'us' at all.

However, having listed our essentials / desirables and trekked around all the available alternatives, it soon became plain that our friends' house was the best on offer for us, so we bought it.

It was never the perfect house, but we made it good enough for 21 years and we were sad to leave it when the time came.

So, it may be a case of going back to your list of needs/wants and seeing if something can fit. That could well be a property that allows you flexibility in the future, even though it might be somewhat unattractive right now and not exactly what you saw yourself buying.

JP1978

Just try and resist the temptation to buy anything that comes on the market.

If your sale is to FTB, do we read that your house is more suitable to FTB's? If so, probably the easiest type of house to sell, assuming the right price - so if this fell through, shouldnt be too long for another buyer.

The market generally starts to pick up this time of year from what I read, so you may find more houses come on the market that you can look at.

ThePants999

Consider going into a rented property. Not only will it allow you to complete your sale, but it'll put you in a strong buying position when you find the house you want, which is important if you're very particular about what you want.

Davesnave

ThePants999 wrote: »

Consider going into a rented property. Not only will it allow you to complete your sale, but it'll put you in a strong buying position when you find the house you want, which is important if you're very particular about what you want.

This is the option I didn't mention because it's such a faff, but if you're going for a very long term buy, it may be worth it.

We did it on our 3rd move, but there's a difference between then and now in terms of interest rates on the banked money and the way house prices are in some areas.

We were getting 6.5% and making a profit from renting, while house prices were tanking everywhere. It's not like that now, so this strategy comes with a health warning!

The strong buying position holds, though, and it worked for us.

danielley

I'm in the same position. We accepted an offer on our house between Christmas and New Year to first-time buyers, we found a property a fortnight ago (and had an offer accepted) but the owners have since taken the house off the market, so it's back to the drawing board on the search.

We are relaxing our criteria slightly as we were hesitant to view anything initially that wasn't 100% perfect on paper, but due to the lack of supply, we are having to re-assess.

I'm in the early stages of pregnancy so moving into rented wouldn't be ideal, but we are prepared to do it because the next home will be our long-term home and we want to make sure we have the right property.

Good luck!

davidmcn

I would just find somewhere to rent in the interim - may be a temporary faff, but rather that than feel you've got a second-best house for years to come. Also saves most of the "chain" hassle.

jimbog

davidmcn wrote: »

I would just find somewhere to rent in the interim - may be a temporary faff, but rather that than feel you've got a second-best house for years to come. Also saves most of the "chain" hassle.

I did this for 18 months and it worked out well. Two things I realised was that I felt 'free', empowered and flexible but also as time went on I started to feel uneasy that house prices may well move up and that I also missed having 'my own place'