How to find homes for sale not on a housing estate

AdrianC

Waterlily24 wrote: »

I usually use Zoopla...

That narrows the pool right down, even before you start filtering...

victoriavictorious

Coming across properties you *don't* want in a RM search just comes with the territory. It's a bit of a pain but it really doesn't take too long to plough through them.
For my own purposes, I really would welcome an option on RM to search for period properties only (perhaps with further date filters) but again, there aren't any.

Slithery

WabbitWabbit wrote: »

It is more finding an area that I like and the perfect property that I can afford.

Ha ha ha
Isn't it always?

Davesnave

WabbitWabbit wrote: »

It is more finding an area that I like and the perfect property that I can afford.

One problem with not being in a fully developed area, like an estate or similar, is the potential for your 'perfect' property to become imperfect as a result of a change in planning.

Our first two properties were in built-up places, so we knew that there was little scope for development nearby, other than extensions.

Now, although we're in the country with plenty of space around, there's the possibility of losing one view at any time, thanks to there being farm buildings nearby. Where there's one, there can always be more.

Residents in the nearby town discovered this truth a few years ago when their non-estate, individual houses suddenly had their views curtailed by about 25miles!

Detroit

Slithery wrote: »

Ha ha ha
Isn't it always?

Right house, right location, right price, pick two?

warby68

Defining 'estate' is probably why there isn't an easy solution.

I THINK we live on an estate as in the houses were built by the same developer but its older, lots of different house types and actually just one long winding uphill road with views over countryside. Some of the neighbours would fall over if you called it an estate but I understand estate to mean an area where one builder built all the homes over a fairly short period.

If you put estate in some websites round here you get a couple of country manors with land!

Others associate it with council/ex council or just new builds. Also how many (or few) properties constitute an estate. There is a cluster of just 5 near here, all different but very much squeezed onto the plots - is that an estate?

Its down to doing the legwork but for most properties the photos give a pretty good clue.

getmore4less

Rightmove (Is there a limit on draw points?)

With careful construction of a draw area and saving it you can build up exclusion zones.

if you draw up/down a road you don't exclude places but create a track outside the draw zone and then you draw round the estate you want to exclude.

start with your broad area and edit as you research to exclude discounted areas.

you can also cross lines to make it easier in some parts

Waterlily24

AdrianC wrote: »

That narrows the pool right down, even before you start filtering...

Yes, you are right but I do look on rightmove as well. It's a bit easier these days. Our problem is that we are not fixed on where we want to live. It's the right property rather than the place.

With our last house I kept on putting the details in the bin because it looked like a 1960s bungalow on an estate. Not living near the location it was hard to tell (before internet). We lived on the South Coast and were buying in South Lincolnshire. Anyway we went there for the weekend and went into all the estate agents. One of the estate agents gave us the details of the one I had been throwing away again. They said it was semi rural with no near neighbours, we viewed it and bought it. :rotfl:

maisie_cat

The only thing I can think of is to use the keywords "non estate" in the search term, but given the inability of estate agents to correctly categorise detached from semi detached I wouldn't hold out much hope of it working. Any search is only as good as the information provided by the agent.

victoriavictorious

The problem is that RM searches can be so hit and miss as to what they'll show you, that the only sure fire way of not missing anything, is to use as few filtering criteria as you can.
I found that even the drawn search omitted to show houses within that area which *did* appear in the full list search.
I also stopped using the time criteria, eg 'within 24 hours' etc, as that did not include properties that had since come back on the market (after having been under offer), so unless I'd either bookmarked them previously or ploughed through the full search each day - which is what I did end up doing - I'd never have known they were even available again.
And as others have said, any search is dependent on how well (or badly) the agent has described / categorised any particular property.
Another example of this is if you search for 'character property' which is actually a RM category, but you'll only get a handful (or none) come up, whereas there can be a lot more come up in the full list search - because the agents have not described them as such.