Advice on Sale of my elderly mothers house

old_fogey

My mother has been in a local care home for a month, and is now planning to move to a care home near me - 200 miles away. We need to sell her house - please could I have some advice -
How empty (of furniture) does the house need to be? And the Garage? what is acceptable to leave and what isnt. What sorts of companies will take it away ? I have a small car and will go down and get her personal affects, and make trips to the skip.
Or is it better to leave it furnished for he viewings?
The agent will need to conduct accompanied viewings. For insurance purposes does this count as the house being occupied ?
It is a long time since I have sold a house and times have moved on.....I'm presuming she physically needs to sign the sale documents...so the solicitor needs to be near her new home ??
And anything else you can think of
Thank you !

swingaloo

Not sure about the legal side of selling the house but I think it would be better to completely empty it before sale. If I was buying I wouldn't want to have to start taking the previous owners things to the tip, likewise the garage.

You could get in touch with a house clearance company to empty it (after you haver taken the valuables of course). There are some that charge quite a lot to clear houses but some don't charge at all. You need to shop around. What area is the house in?

gettingtheresometime

Having furniture in a property does it you a sense of scale, especially where you could get a single bed into the room but you wouldn't think it to look at the room bare.

We've been in properties that have been totally emptied and ones where some personal effects (photos) as well as furniture have been left.

I would imagine that for insurance purposes the property would be classed as unoccupied

AnotherJoe

I think a completely empty house screams "owner desperate to sell".

Leave large furniture like beds and sofas and dining tables so people can visualise how it works and don't get an impression of an abandoned unloved house. There's a reason that show house s aren't just left empty.

You can clear it after exchange. There are house clearance companies just get quotes so from local ones.

Call the insurance company and ask, though you slept over once a month on your house tidying visits, that would then count as it not being unoccupied for more than a month.

mufi

old_fogey wrote: »

My mother has been in a local care home for a month, and is now planning to move to a care home near me - 200 miles away. We need to sell her house - please could I have some advice -
How empty (of furniture) does the house need to be? And the Garage? what is acceptable to leave and what isnt. What sorts of companies will take it away ? I have a small car and will go down and get her personal affects, and make trips to the skip.
Or is it better to leave it furnished for he viewings?
The agent will need to conduct accompanied viewings. For insurance purposes does this count as the house being occupied ?
It is a long time since I have sold a house and times have moved on.....I'm presuming she physically needs to sign the sale documents...so the solicitor needs to be near her new home ??
And anything else you can think of
Thank you !

I did this in similar circumstances a couple of years ago. What we did was remove the clutter and, of course, personal effects, and leave the big stuff - beds, sofas etc., leaving the rooms relatively presentable. Then we got someone in to magnolia the walls, but left the patterned carpets etc. in place. The garage we left until after exchange - I have never yet viewed a house that didn't have a cluttered garage, and I've only seen one containing a car...

Insurance, we found, was a specialised area and you need to shop around. We used a broker, but think the insurer we found no longer does unoccupied premises. Don't assume that the odd viewing constitutes the property being occupied. It probably doesn't.

Use a nearby solicitor (personal recommendations are good), in case you need to drop off documents. She will need to sign documents, unless you have POA (which may be worth getting, if your Mother is agreeable).

You may find a charity to do a full clearance, or may need to get a house clearance company, which is chargeable. Be tactful - your mother will not appreciate the fact that her much-loved possessions and furniture are not worth anything and, in fact, cost money to remove. On completion, the property must be cleared. If you want to leave anything (eg washing machine etc) make sure it's on the PIF form, which is completed as part of the legalities of house selling, via your solicitor.

The very best to you. It's not easy, and a parent going into care is pretty traumatic for everyone.

onejontwo

mufi wrote: »

You may find a charity to do a full clearance, or may need to get a house clearance company, which is chargeable. Be tactful - your mother will not appreciate the fact that her much-loved possessions and furniture are not worth anything and, in fact, cost money to remove.

I wouldn't pay to have stuff removed in fact just the opposite. We were in a similar situation and left the the best items of furniture beds, tables etc to "dress the room" for sale. After the house sold we then asked the best quotes to purchase the furniture and anything half decent, and took the remaining rubbish to the local tip.

old_fogey

Thank you all.
VERY useful. I didnt think about a partial clearance.
Yes, I could get rid of clutter and the really tatty chipboard wardrobes.
That would make space; and leave beds, and fairly good sofa and dining room set to show the rooms off.

I will investigate the insurance when I am next down - I will read the policy

Swingaloo - it is in Birmingham

AdrianC

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly...

Do you have power of attorney over her financial affairs?
If not, YOU cannot sell HER house.
Is she still capable of giving her informed consent to important paperwork? If so, then focus on the PoA first. That allows YOU to do everything else.

I would presume that the house is, he says delicately, "in need of some modernisation"? And probably not exactly the freshest of properties...? If so, then clear as much out as possible. EVERYTHING. Buyers will recognise it's a project, and they won't be doing the whole Phil and Kirsty baking-bread-smells-oooh-nice-sofa guff. They will want to see what the fabric of the building is like. They can't do that with three commodes, a decade's worth of Daily Mails and a threadbare health-hazard of a hideous sofa hiding the damp bits.

Go through as much of the stuff as you can, as thoroughly as you can. You don't know what important paperwork might be in a "safe place". She may know that she hid the numbered Swiss bank account details in page 243 of Thora Hird's autobiog, but you don't. Nor do you know that the biscuit tin contains Great Uncle Albert's VC.

Don't slap a coat of magnolia over it all - all you'll do is make the clued-up buyers suspicious of what you're hiding. And they're the only ones that are realistically going to buy it - everybody else will run a mile sooner or later.

Is it registered at the LR? If not, it might be worth getting the ball rolling on that, too, so that you at least know you've got all the paperwork for when you get a buyer on the hook.

mufi

onejontwo wrote: »

I wouldn't pay to have stuff removed in fact just the opposite. We were in a similar situation and left the the best items of furniture beds, tables etc to "dress the room" for sale. After the house sold we then asked the best quotes to purchase the furniture and anything half decent, and took the remaining rubbish to the local tip.

What matters is if the stuff is actually worth anything to anyone. Arguably, most older people's furniture is not. Sad, but true.

Best to be realistic.

AdrianC

mufi wrote: »

What matters is if the stuff is actually worth anything to anyone. Arguably, most older people's furniture is not. Sad, but true.

Best to be realistic.

There can be good money in retro 50s/60s/70s furnishings at the moment - IF you know what you're looking at.

You can bet that house clearance people do.
You can also bet that most of them will be well aware that most families of elderly people don't... And they WILL take advantage of that, given half a chance.

knightstyle

lots of good advice above, I would add it is important to have the correct answers for the forms the buyers solicitors solicitor will require filled in by you or your mum. So get answers ready, nothing puts a buyer off more than a load of don't knows.
Assuming al is in order with them get an electrical report and get the gas appliances serviced with a safety test.
We did as many have said, declutter and leave some furniture, not too much. We didn't repaint or do anything else. Our biggest problem was getting rid of stuff, charities do not want it and freecycle was a complete disaster, in the end we made several trips to the tip.