Average number of house viewings?

Askalaba

For anybody who has purchased a house, how many house viewings do you usually have before putting in an offer?

I've only had 3 house viewings and I already feel like I've found my dream home. My only problem is I don't really have a view as to how much the house should be worth. I get the feeling the house is slightly overprice but I have no comparison. I also think I should get a few more viewings under my belt before I put in an offer. I'm just trying to get the balance between making sure I don't pay too much whilst also making sure I don't miss the boat unnecessarily :beer:

SunnyCat

I asked this question a few weeks ago (in Mortgages forum as I completely overlooked the existence of this one... )
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5995946/how-many-properties-did-you-view

We don't live in the area we're buying in, so we saw a lot of places - 22! We ended up visiting two towns we were looking at on two separate weekends. First time we saw 10 properties, second 12. We nearly put an offer on the first house we saw but we found we much preferred town no.2. If we stuck with town no.1, that's the house we would have chosen.

We have however looked extensively online for 2 months prior to this, so had a good idea what the market was like from that.

Askalaba

Thanks SunnyCat, i'll give your other forum a look as well.

We've done a lot of research online however it's still not clear when sellers are essentially over charging for their home when in reality the sale price is much lower

Davesnave

Askalaba wrote: »

We've done a lot of research online however it's still not clear when sellers are essentially over charging for their home when in reality the sale price is much lower

Depends entirely on how easy it is to find comparables in sold data. In urban areas for a standard sort of house, it's straightforward to find them and compare features, though I agree seeing things in the flesh is best. Again, that's easier in town.

Go into the countryside, add some land and possibly unique or period features and things become much trickier, especially spread over several counties with subtle nuances to learn about in so many locales.

That's why we looked at around 25 in detail and maybe 50+ in drive-bys. Google Earth is so much better now!

Only offer to pay what it's worth to you. What others will pay is irrelevant. I probably overpaid on the very first house I bought, (sealed bids) but like you, I felt it was perfect for my needs at that time. Ten years later, the extra money I'd added to secure it was forgotten when selling. It was a great first buy.

DigForVictory

Davesnave wrote: »

Besides, only offer to pay what it's worth to you.

This. If you are frankly addled, and just want a bit of certainty, let alone a roof over your head, then get the surveyors in to reality check the price.

Or you can make a several month long near full time job of hunting the exactly right priced placed place that has every box ticked but somehow doesn't quite feel quite like home.

If site number three leaves you with warm fuzzies, call the RICS squad out & form a plan to pay for it all. There may perhaps be other places, but if you're happy & the price is right, Stop hunting!

(Even online. Give yourself a break. Buying is hard enough without triple guessing yourself!)

EmmyLou30

When I was a FTB I viewed 5 in one day with my parents and had an offer accepted on one of them the following day. Then me and my husband viewed just 1 house and had an offer accepted (ultimately fell through) and then viewed just 1 again and ended up buying that one.


We were after a 1990's 4 bed in a town we knew well so they were all fairly comparable using Rightmove and a drive by so that's why we were able to be so decisive - viewing it was more of a formality as we knew it was the right size and layout in the right street and that we'd be totally redecorating anyway. I think maybe we're just decisive people!


I have a friend who's been searching for the dream home for 10 years and viewed in excess of 100....so 'average' is anywhere in between :-)

OldMusicGuy

Askalaba wrote: »

I've only had 3 house viewings and I already feel like I've found my dream home. My only problem is I don't really have a view as to how much the house should be worth. I get the feeling the house is slightly overprice but I have no comparison.

Viewings? None, because we are buying a new build from a small developer. But we have just spent 18 months doing detailed research online, visiting areas with potential houses and getting a feel for the area and also the property market. We would drive around and look at houses that were on the market (without viewing) to get a sense of what was in our price range. We watched what houses were selling and which houses were hanging around for 6 months or more. We could start to see what the market is doing and also start to assess which houses were overpriced for the market.

If you haven't done this kind of research then you are going in a bit blind. When we saw what the developer was planning to build and saw the plot, we knew this was our dream house. If not quite our "dream" house, it was the closest to what we wanted and it was really good value for money. But that was because we pretty much knew every house that was currently on the market or had been on the market in the last 6 months our target price range in the area we were considering.

There is so much information available online these days it is not hard to get a sense of where the market is and what a reasonable price looks like.

ReadingTim

About the same as the length of the average piece of string.

Albala

I think people do fewer viewings now, they use info on the internet to filter out the ones they feel they need to see. We viewed about four last time, only one this.

It's easier for people like me with a fair number of non-negotiable things to whittle it down to one or two. If you haven't a lot of specific requirements, though you have the luxury of more options, it may be a bit more difficult in that way, and you may need to see more houses to get the 'feel' of which you like best. We have very little choice once we have taken out the 'can't make this work' or 'can't afford' ones. We have had to go for pretty much the only one which had what we needed in our price bracket that I'd seen in two years + of looking on rightmove, etc.. How it 'felt' was pretty irrelevant, ithough had it felt truly awful we might have had to reconsider.

[Deleted User]

We viewed 5 in total and offered there and then on the house we bought. We knew as soon as we saw it that it was the house for us. Just had that feeling that we hadn't got with all the other houses.

Askalaba

Davesnave wrote: »

Depends entirely on how easy it is to find comparables in sold data. In urban areas for a standard sort of house, it's straightforward to find them and compare features, though I agree seeing things in the flesh is best. Again, that's easier in town.

I'm looking at town. Presumably there's lots of information out there showing how much houses in the area have sold for?


I'd be really interested to see the difference between asking prices and offer prices