Advice needed - house won't sell

GLANSW

Crashy_Time wrote: »

So the rental value in London does not cover your mortgage at the lowest interest rates in history?

Sadly not. We'd be about a few hundred short. In honesty, we never even considered renting the property when we purchased it - it just wasn't in our thinking at the time.

GLANSW

lincroft1710 wrote: »

When you say the construction is "brick and timber", what part of the construction does the timber form?

Good question, and I'm not entirely sure. It was flagged as an issue in one survey - although we couldn't get hold of the survey to find out exactly what this meant. But I'd imagine it would apply to the rest of the street and a couple of properties have had no issues in selling recently.

GLANSW

Corona wrote: »

Would definitely explore the auction option, as others have mentioned (you can set a reserve price)

Also - have you considered getting a lodger, just to help with your cash flow? Some websites enable you to find someone who just wants a room from Monday-Friday (and who goes home at the weekends). Or even AirBnB (depending on where you live in London)?

Sadly the house is currently empty, so we'd have get furnishings back in for the house, which will be hard to do, given we don't really have anyone who can do this for us in the UK.

I think auction is the route we're going down. Spent a lot of the weekend researching in detail and plan to speak to a few auction houses on Monday.

GLANSW

Crashy_Time wrote: »

Yep, good suggestion, but I thought property anywhere near London was a one way bet for selling on (at a massive profit of course) and for renting out?

You'd think...

What we're getting offered is way under what Zoopla values it at and way under what every estate agent has valued it at. Every other property in the area has gone up significantly. We're struggling to get much more than we paid for it four years ago. I think ours has just been labelled as problem, and gone into a bit of a downward spiral.

GLANSW

Crashy_Time wrote: »

They would have to become an "accidental landlord" and with the tax changes this might be more of a pain that just taking the hit on price?

Yep, you're right on this. Every calculation we did had renting being more expensive for us in the short term - with cash flow currently we simply couldn't afford it.

AdrianC

GLANSW wrote: »

What we're getting offered is way under what Zoopla values it at...

Mmm. Crashy is probably more accurate.

Crashy_Time

GLANSW wrote: »

Sadly not. We'd be about a few hundred short. In honesty, we never even considered renting the property when we purchased it - it just wasn't in our thinking at the time.

You just have to get the price you can and move on then, no other way it seems?

Crashy_Time

Quizzical_Squirrel wrote: »

I was surprised to read that to help sell their house, many people bury a statue of St Joseph upside down in their garden.

Even more surprisingly, some people genuinely think this works.

Worth a try, JC certainly isn`t going to help, unless you leave it empty too long that is

Scotbot

GLANSW wrote: »

We thought that re: the loft but this was what the bank rejected the mortgage on. It's the only survey of four that this came up as an issue - no other survey has raised it as a problem.

Do you know for certain the lenders refused based on the surveys A buyer may use it as an excuse, But if yiou know for sure then you are eliminating a large proportion of the market, essentially you can only sell to cash buyers so auction is the way to go.