Buying a house near a planned gypsy site

Beenie

Do not buy. You will never be able to relax knowing that a gypsy site is planned nearby.

They might be OK but the likelihood is trouble of every sort - mess, theft, antisocial behaviour, threatening behaviour.

Your house is the biggest financial asset you will ever have. It's not worth the gamble, and you should look elsewhere. The big warning sign is that your vendor wants out now while the going is good.....he is probably sweating about the sale, and will it go through in time.

rach_k

I thought travellers were considered an ethnic group so a lot of the comments here are pretty horrendous. OP, if you're going to agree with that kind of thinking, why not ask about Croydon's racial make-up too? Lots of opportunity for discrimination there to keep people happy.

Beenie

What ethnic group? They are mostly white British (often of Irish origin). I think true Romanies could be different, but they aren't the ones who cause the problems, and don't usually need council sites.

Silvertabby

rach_k wrote: »

I thought travellers were considered an ethnic group so a lot of the comments here are pretty horrendous. OP, if you're going to agree with that kind of thinking, why not ask about Croydon's racial make-up too? Lots of opportunity for discrimination there to keep people happy.

I'm sure there are some very nice travellers out there. Unfortunately the bad ones spoil it for everyone.

We had a group of travellers on the edge of our estate a while ago. The police managed to move them on, but in the time they were there a couple of houses were broken into (almost unheard of), garden gates were rattled during the night (B&Q did a roaring trade in gate locks when the travellers first arrived) and a group of men toured the estate looking closely at the houses.

After they had been moved on, it took the council 2 days to remove all the carp they had left behind.

rach_k

Beenie wrote: »

What ethnic group? They are mostly white British (often of Irish origin). I think true Romanies could be different, but they aren't the ones who cause the problems, and don't usually need council sites.

Romany gypsies and Irish travellers are both considered ethnic groups.

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/discrimination/protected-characteristics/gypsies-and-travellers-race-discrimination/

rach_k

Silvertabby wrote: »

I'm sure there are some very nice travellers out there. Unfortunately the bad ones spoil it for everyone.

You could say that about any ethnic group. 50 years ago you could say 'no Blacks'. Now we look back and realise how unacceptable that was. I don't think travellers are any different.

jimbog

Would you have any reservations about buying next to a gypsy camp rach_k?

bowlhead99

sxp842 wrote: »

One thing I have just realised - the traveller site has only been proposed at the end of my road as part of croydon council's local plan. Apparently a planning application would need to be submitted and approved before it was actually a certainty, and no application has been made yet.

Would that make a difference to anyone?

No, it wouldn't make a difference to me. While there are plenty of very nice gypsies/ travellers, I still wouldn't choose to buy a property a few minutes' walk from a such a site, whether it is a site currently full of them or merely a site that local government has proposed to be full of them. You can see the impact of gypsy sites around the country on their local areas, and on average, it's not zero impact. So it's rational to generalise even if the result of that generalisation is to appear racist or 'prejudiced' by pre-judging.

What you're saying is:

- The council have put the site in their plan.
- They have not yet had a public consultation and final planning application.

When they make it an official planning application, the people in the local area who find out about it and don't want it will complain about it, and the council will say they are just Nimbys and the site has to go somewhere and this is the best site for it which is why they put it in their plan in the first place .

So, unless you have an insight into the council's plans and the process of finalising how public land gets used, which identifies why the plan to put gypsies there will be extremely likely to fail, you have to assume it's going ahead.

As you've seen from the thread there are some people who say it might still be OK to live there with just the odd bit of crime and civil unrest if you don't mind that kind of thing, and other people who say you couldn't pay them to buy a house near the site. So, you would have to be naive to imagine there would be no negative effect on local house prices when so many people would not want to buy your house off you - whether for valid and justifiable reasons, or for bigoted and racist reasons, or for snobbish reasons or whatever.

If you are banking on the council plan failing to be put into practice because you forsee there will be a massive strength of feeling from local residents - because residents hate the idea of having a gypsy community within their own... then that tells you that if(when) the site goes ahead because the council have no better place for it, the prices will indeed get hit hard. Because the very reason you think the site might get stopped is your own knowledge/suspicion is that there is a massive negative strength of feeling about living near these sites and people really don't want to be near to one.

If the site is known about (by being in a council plan, even if not yet put in a formal Plan application) then one would expect prices to already fall, because of the risk of it happening, and then fall further when it actually happens. Only if it doesn't happen, could you make money if you had bought at a discount because of the fear factor and then it turned out that the council instead approved something much nicer for the site instead.

Your problem is that at the moment you are not even proposing to get it at a discount, you are proposing to get it at a premium to what the seller had asked - presumably because there is competition from someone else who is offering the full asking price because they don't know about the site or just happen to love those communities. You should walk off and leave them to it. The reason that people have a long time between making offers and exchanging signed contracts is to allow you to do all your searches and research to ensure you are definitely happy to go ahead at the proposed price. And you have found a reason that means you can't know that the price you proposed is really a fair price.

The reason you can't know it is a fair price is because (a) you don't really know what impact the introduction of a gypsy/ traveller site will have on the quality of life, quality of services and consequentially the house values in the area and (b) you don't really know the likelihood (between 50-100%) of the council plan turning into the council reality (though presumably, the council themselves have a pretty strong hand in determining what happens with their land in their borough).

So with those unknowns (a) and (b), in betting or investing terminonlogy, you can't price the risk. So you don't know whether your 'fair' offer should be the price six months ago minus 10%, minus 20%, plus 5%, or anything really. Going in at over the asking price on the basis that the seller must have been pricing it too cheap for what it's really worth, is pretty ballsy when you are not sure what it would be worth with or without the site and what the chances of the site happening.


In your shoes, I would just admit I don't know, so I can't really determine whether the price I offered is 'fair' for the potential outcomes, and I'd go off and find a different location where the local environment has a more stable outlook. Unless the seller wants to do something outrageous like knock 25% off so you can have complete peace of mind that you would be happy to live there because you got it so cheap. Which they won't do, especially if you had to offer over their asking price to get accepted in the face of competition from other offerors.

moneyistooshorttomention

I can never understand why it's being said they're a different ethnic group - they're as British as I am (and my family is English both sides going back many generations - that "5th generation malarkey"....to quote a "card" some British people play.....

I think they're just calling themselves a different ethnic group - in order to be able to play a "race card" that isn't actually really on the table.

A lot of people look for a "card" they can play - to get better treatment than everyone else - they're married/they have children/etc/etc and this is just the "card" they found - but I don't think it's applicable imo.

A_Nice_Englishman

jimbog wrote: »

Would you have any reservations about buying next to a gypsy camp rach_k?

I was going to suggest rach_k solved the OPs dilemma by buying the property and renting it to them. After, say, five years they could either buy it if all was hunky-dory or else walk away.