House buying help

FHB_2

Hi,

I'm not currently buying or selling a house but looking for some advice on the topic and hoping some people on here can help.

Long story short, I recently found myself out of work and decided to use this time to learn some coding web site building skills. Having been through the stressful house buying process I came up with the idea of a digital assistant to guide people through the house buying process and tell you what you need to do, when to do it and how as well as taking care of the boring tasks such as researching estate agents, solicitors etc.

I built this just as a learning exercise but I'm wondering if anyone else would find it useful? If so, any ideas about where I could find people to test it out and see if it would be useful? I did some research but it seems most people just look on rightmove and go from there once they find a house they like, any other views on that?

Thanks.

mrginge

I will test it. Where is the link?

FHB_2

Am I allowed to post a link? It doesn't seem like I can.

gettingtheresometime

FHB wrote: »

Am I allowed to post a link? It doesn't seem like I can.

I think you have to have a post count of 10 before you are allowed to post links

davidmcn

FHB wrote: »

Am I allowed to post a link? It doesn't seem like I can.

You can if you obfuscate it with some spaces etc.

comeandgo

Will it work with the Scottish house buying legalities or just English?

FHB_2

Ok, try fantastichousebuyers dot com.

I'm afraid it doesn't cater for the Scottish system at the moment, no reason it couldn't do though.

Bass_9

I think the design of the site is pretty good for the first version, well done.

What I don't understand is, how can this actually help me to secure a house?

Slithery

Personally I wouldn't trust anything to a website that isn't 100% served over https nowadays. With letsencrypt offering free certs with easy to configure auto-renewal for all of the popular web servers its a no-brainer (no affiliation except being a satisfied customer with about 20 free certificates).

Either get a decent host that provides this or set it up yourself, then I'll click past the first page

FHB_2

Hi Bass_9, Thanks for the feedback!

The way I saw it helping was by helping you get everything you need to sorted (knowing exactly what you can spend, how much your costs will be, getting a mortgage broker/AIP, solicitor etc.) so that when you find a house you want to make an offer on you're in the strongest possible position to have it accepted/be taken seriously.

I also found that the property shortlists on the main portals are pretty lacking so wanted to make something that made keeping track of all the houses you'd seen/considered/discounted easier.

I was also thinking about all the houses that are sold before they hit the portals (we bought our current house before it hit the market as the agent we were selling with had just valued it so we got to see it before anyone else) and ways that you could let agents know that you're a serious buyer and hopefully are one of the people they contact when something new comes up.

FHB_2

Hi Slithery, it is https and has an ssl certificate. Because I can't post links I guess what I posted took you to the http version by default (couldn't work out how to divert that to the https version), the proper link that I would normally share is certainly 100% https though.