West London asking prices are finally turning!!!

Biggie

I had a phone call from a estate agent about a family desperate is sell a 4 bed detached ihouse in Kenton.

it was orignally on at 650 then 600 then 585 eventually it was under offer at 550 but fell through as the buyer got nevious about underpinning. I was asked to view it at £515. I was all up for it but the wife didn't like it (bad feel what ever that is).

anyway still on the market at £515

now that's what I call a drop in asking price :eek:

hgllgh

happinessfactory wrote: »

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails-7682958.rsp?pa_n=1&tr_t=buy

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails-16730834.rsp?pa_n=3&tr_t=buy

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails-9188265.rsp?pa_n=3&tr_t=buy

Hope that helps.:)

My parents live in Cheshire and cannot imagine why £1.2m only buys a 15 ft yard to call a garden, no off-street parking, in an area as dirty and poor as this one, with no good state schools at all...

I have lived in the same area for a number of years and know it well. It makes me angry to see the market in this area of London taking people to the cleaners. ... Take the 3 properties above ... all of them are either side of the Uxbridge road. Both sides have sprawling estates of poor social housing with huge crime problems. Take the £1.2M property above ... The other high street that it joins onto is the Goldhawk road, this high street is a crime ridden cesspit with massage parlours and bad pubs occupied by all the local drug dealers that are being regularly nicked on the street for everyone to see.... still want to pay £1.2M for a 4 bed house?

The place has a high quanitity of tramps and a growing problem with youngsters in gangs. Let's not paper over the cracks here ... it was only a few weeks ago that a teenager was stabbed to death in hammersmith grove a few streets away. I attended the Notting Hill Carnival again this year and after 18 years of going I have never seen so many teenage gang muppets. They were all over the place and each gang averaged about 50 or so. If I was married with kids I would think long and hard about bringing them up and living in this area.

To add to the problems there has been a massive influx of immigrants which has just made the housing situation much worse and means the area is now hugely overcrowded .... English isn't spoken on the streets anymore ... !!!!!! is this Labour government doing to us, do they even have border controls anymore? Do they give a sh**? Maybe they are too busy shovelling £12.5 BILLION of tax payers money in a poxy patient records system that doesn't work. These muppets have GOT to go.

So with all these problems in this area, it is massively over valued.
It is an absolute JOKE.

nobblyned

So fairly priced stuff is going above asking? And overpriced stuff isn't shifting?

So what's changed?

CB1979_2

so basically what you're saying is the stupid priced places £500k+ are lowering prices, yet the others are all still going at asking or plus 2-3% over asking price.

hardly "turning"

but agree the area is a shitehole

sorry posted same time as nobblybed

happinessfactory

nobblyned wrote: »

So fairly priced stuff is going above asking? And overpriced stuff isn't shifting?

So what's changed?

Sorry I didn't make myself clear. Just a few weeks ago, even the stupidly priced stuff was shifting within the week.

Agreed, the area is a dump. But you have to cut your coat according to your cloth, and if we could have bought a house in Kensington, we would have done.

Oh and by the way, I think immigration is the best thing that could happen to Shepherds Bush. We need some motivated and hardworking folk around here. I just wish the many lazy-arsed dole-scrounging cut-price-council-house-dwelling Brits would leave, so I can buy a house and start the process of civilising the streets with honest hardworking people like us.

hgllgh

happinessfactory wrote: »

Sorry I didn't make myself clear. Just a few weeks ago, even the stupidly priced stuff was shifting within the week.

Agreed, the area is a dump. But you have to cut your coat according to your cloth, and if we could have bought a house in Kensington, we would have done.

Oh and by the way, I think immigration is the best thing that could happen to Shepherds Bush. We need some motivated and hardworking folk around here. I just wish the many lazy-arsed dole-scrounging cut-price-council-house-dwelling Brits would leave, so I can buy a house and start the process of civilising the streets with honest hardworking people like us.

Kensington and Chelsea are part of the city investor belt and have been takien over by foreign property investment so they are out of sight.

I agree, there are a lots of lazy arsed brits in the area too, but, immigration just seems to have got completely out of control and it seems to be making renting a difficult thing to do as well as pushing prices up. I really struggled to find somewhere to rent during the summer.

Don't get me wrong ... i am all for immigration with a mix of cultures BUT it has to be controlled or you get the problems outlined above ....

http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/

"The government's own figures show that foreign immigrants are arriving at 1,300 a day and leaving at only 500 a day. The net inflow under Labour has been two million and immigration will now add a further one million to our population every five years. In practical terms, we will have to build
200 houses every day of the week for the next 20 years just to house new immigrants."

Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migrationwatch points out that the new ONS assumption, released today, at last recognises that the present very high levels of immigration are likely to continue unless the government moves from rhetoric to really effective measures.
He highlights that it means that our population will increase by about 8.7 million between 2004 and 2031 of which 7.2 million, or 86% will be due to immigration.
Furthermore, housing demand simply for new immigrants will increase from 200 a day to 260 a day throughout the next twenty years.
This is not remotely "managed migration". Continued immigration on this scale is completely unacceptable to the vast majority of the public."

nobblyned

happinessfactory wrote: »

Sorry I didn't make myself clear. Just a few weeks ago, even the stupidly priced stuff was shifting within the week.

If it was stupidly priced and shifting, then by definition it wasn't stupidly priced.

If what I think you are trying to say is that you believe average asking and selling prices are falling for like for like properties, then that is interesting, and will come out in the HPI figures over the next couple of months.

happinessfactory

nobblyned wrote: »

If it was stupidly priced and shifting, then by definition it wasn't stupidly priced.

I guess that depends on the definition of 'stupid' you're using.

To me, borrowing 3.5X JOINT salary or 85% LTV in order to buy a house that has doubled in price in 18 months - even though the area hasn't improved one jot in that time - is very stupid indeed.

Not to mention utterly terrifying.

But that hasn't stopped several of my friends taking on those kinds of arrangements. London seems full of otherwise smart people who seem to conflate "we can afford it" with "we can borrow it", and will pay whatever it takes to get the house they want. And I call that a stupid mistake too.

Let's do some sums for the likely buyers of this "stupidly priced" (by my definition) house in Coverdale for £1.2m quid.

The likely buyers are probably a managment consultant or a lawyer on around £100k (bankers would live in Brook Green). His/her partner is perhaps something in media taking home £75k.

Bank will lend them £612, 500, and they'll need to find £587,500 of equity (no calculator so forgive errors if my sums are wrong please).

Say before they got together, each of them had a flat which sold for 350k (the usual price of small two beds round here; assume they'd originally bought in 1999 for say, 150k each). So they have £400k of equity (perhaps a little more if they didn't buy with 100% mortgages, which is unlikely).

That still leaves a shortfall of £187,500. So, as I asked in my earlier thread, where on earth is that money coming from? From the bank of mum and dad if they're lucky, from "gearing up" if they're not (higher LTV, higher multiple, or longer mortgage term).

To be earning the kind of crust that I mentioned, this couple are probably in their mid-thirties and either planning to have a kid or already pregnant. Within the year, she'll be on maternity leave, which will leave hubby servicing the mortgage alone for at least six months - and very possible many more, if wife decides to have another kid sharpish, or goes part-time after the kid is born.

Surely this is a nightmare waiting to happen? There is absolutely no margin for disaster at all. What if one of them loses their job, or the baby has a serious illness and needs a parent at home full-time?

I hasten to add this example is not specifically my story (though we are indeed moving to get married and, I hope, have a baby) but it's a fairly accurate picture - I'm a demographer and studied the data profile in my area very closely before choosing which streets I wanted to live in. We have friends and neighbours who almost certainly fit this profile. It's happening and it's scary.

But then, one woman's "stupidity" is another man's "comfortable risk".

carolt

Spot-on analysis, happinessfactory. I do find it curious, though, given your own (I think highly accurate) summary of the current state of the property market, why you are choosing to buy at all now? Why, if you think property is stupidly overpriced, are you searching desperately? Why not rent?

I came to the same conclusions as you a few months back re the state of the property market - we no longer live in W London, thank goodness, but in a lovely Home Counties village...and rent. We're not in quite the same position as we already have 3 kids, but they have been born and brought up in rented accomodation and whilst previously I resented this, as we got let down over a number of properties we were trying to buy, I have now come to terms with it and have actively chosen NOT to be in the current market.

Current prices are madness - ordinary family houses in ordinary parts of London routinely selling for over a million quid? How many millionaires are there out there???! (NOT paper ones....) These valuations are clearly loopy and at some point, sooner or later, it will be payback time - possibly literally, as the current thread about the future for BTL suggests....

In the meantime, if you've been lucky enough to make a killing on property over the last few years, I'd sell up now while you can still realise a healthy (obscene?...) profit, and take early retirement.....