Next time ...

todayisagreatday

Well there won't be a next time for us as we've now got our forever home.

The quote 'assume everything needs doing and its a pleasant surprise when something works and has plenty of life in it' couldn't be truer for us, but we expected it. In fact I'd prefer it this way, no expectations on anything working!

That said the surveyor said our roof would probably collapse the same day we moved in and it's still up so far.

Bacon_Sandwich

1. Hire a removals firm.

2. Have a professional clean done on new house before setting foot inside.

airandwater

Next time I will research properties months before making an offer. You can never know enough about properties, places to live and everything else that's affected.

Davesnave

airandwater wrote: »

Next time I will research properties months before making an offer. You can never know enough about properties, places to live and everything else that's affected.

That's OK if you can, but the best stuff doesn't hang around.

After all, if you need to get an offer in quickly, there's still a few months when you can pull out without penalty, though we only did it once....after doing the homework. The final straw was a bat colony in the loft! :rotfl:

Davesnave

todayisagreatday wrote: »

The quote 'assume everything needs doing and its a pleasant surprise when something works and has plenty of life in it' couldn't be truer for us, but we expected it. In fact I'd prefer it this way, no expectations on anything working!

Our problem was the other way around: much of it worked or was even very new, but none of it was what/where we wanted.


Horrible destroying perfectly good stuff, even if it's within budget.

Niv

SmashedAvacado wrote: »

My key bit of advice is that properties (other than new builds) fall into four buckets

1) those that have been done up by developers prior to sale - these will have lots of bodges and rarely will much of what has been done be high quality

2) those that have been done up by the current owners and look lovely - these will have lots of bodges and not be as nice once you're in them than they look when you are viewing. These will cost you the same in renovations as (3) but be more expensive to buy and you will end up doing more to them than you had planned

3) those that havent been done up by the current owners and ok - these will have lots of bodges. These will cost you the same in renovations as (2) but be more less expensive to buy

4) those that clearly need doing up - you assume everything needs doing and its a pleasant surprise when something works and has plenty of life in it.

(go for 3 and 4)

I went for a 4 but unfortunately there was not much that fell into the pleasant surprise category! On day 1 two of the loo's didn't work for a start!


I think that next time I would chance my arm more on my first offer. I offered 10k under asking and was accepted right away ... oops.

phoebe1989seb

SmashedAvacado wrote: »

My key bit of advice is that properties (other than new builds) fall into four buckets

1) those that have been done up by developers prior to sale - these will have lots of bodges and rarely will much of what has been done be high quality

2) those that have been done up by the current owners and look lovely - these will have lots of bodges and not be as nice once you're in them than they look when you are viewing. These will cost you the same in renovations as (3) but be more expensive to buy and you will end up doing more to them than you had planned

3) those that havent been done up by the current owners and ok - these will have lots of bodges. These will cost you the same in renovations as (2) but be more less expensive to buy

4) those that clearly need doing up - you assume everything needs doing and its a pleasant surprise when something works and has plenty of life in it.

(go for 3 and 4)

We were looking for and chose to buy a 4 (a repossession) earlier this year. There were no pleasant surprises inside - for example, we knew we'd have to install a borehole and were prepared to live without running water/flushing toilets for a few months - and the standard of the PO's work was appalling as expected, but we were pleasantly surprised when we found a large Acer and huge pink Rhododendron we hadn't spotted in the overgrown grounds, lol!

Next time - if there is one and if it's another repo - I'd go in with a much lower offer than we did this time as I'm convinced we could have paid a bit less, although we paid £125k less than it had originally been on the market for so I suppose we did well.