Red flag or not?

Instability

Unicorn_cottage wrote: »

Not necessarily. Do you know who the developer of the estate was? Are there any other charges like maintenance etc. Developers have become very very clever and whilst you may think that buying the freehold is a positive thing it is not necessarily what you think. Please read the link I sent you. They have a FB group too. You could see if the estate you are wanting to buy on is registered there.

Are you considering any other areas? New build housing is becoming increasingly under scrutiny for many many reasons therefore personally I would not want the aggravation.

Sorry for the slow reply, have been busy.

Not sure who the developers were, tried finding out, I know the estates that had issues with subsidence nearby were Bellway & more recent; but the estate we were looking at was built late 1990's so may well have been a different company.

Again, not sure what the best way to find out about maintenance charges are, I was under the assumption there weren't any, and was hoping that those sorts of issues would be raised by our solicitors for us to consider.

Similarly with the vendors buying the freehold; if it did still have restrictions as a leasehold might, would our solicitors not be expected to find this and report it to us? We of course wouldn't be interested in the place if this was going to cause issues like that.

And as a final question would the subsidence issues in the area put most people off, the issues were early 2016 and on a different estate, but not far away and it seems the whole area was likely used for mining - but the Coal Authority say they're regularly monitoring this and the subsidence zone was only confined to that other estate.

Crashy_Time

Nobbie1967 wrote: »

Prices tend to reflect the level of wages in the area, so maybe these haven't risen much over the last 20 years? Who are the main employers around the area? What sort of wages do they pay?

Or maybe prices reflect the level of debt in the area?

pinkteapot

Unicorn_cottage wrote: »

You say that on average that UK house prices have gone up but that is massively skewed by the London and the South East and major cities. The market in the North East is generally a lot slower although of course there are exceptions. I would not expect your property price to rise in the time that you are proposing to live there.

This is spot on. We relocated from the south-east to the north-west in December. We sold our house down south for 30% more than we paid for it in 2014, and we hadn't done anything to it. That was about typical for our area.

We're renting and looking around up here to buy. Looking at sold price histories, prices haven't changed in 15 years. It's a very different market to what we're used to.

With prices stagnant, just be as sure as you can that you'll be happy in the house for a good few years at least. You won't have the house price inflation to offset the cost of buying/selling and moving around every few years. Which is probably why so few houses come on the market here - it's a much smaller/slower market.

The reality is that in an area like yours, and ours now, there is more chance of only selling for what you paid in 5-6 years, but the next house you buy won't have moved in price either.