Should I be wary buying a house in the current climate?

cstreet95

Myself and my partner are in the process of buying our first house together. We have not put any money down yet so it would be easy for us to pull out.
After seeing the financial crash this morning and with the unknown of Brexit looming, we are worried that the house price will drop and we will be stuck paying excessive amounts of money for a house that is worth nothing on the housing market.
Does anyone who is more knowledgeable in this area have any advice for us & what we should do?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

triathlon

You have answered the question yourself, this is your first home, where are you going to live if you don't.
Yes you can try and second guess the property market, but just read some of the posts on here and HPC and see how tragically you can waste your life gambling. OK there might be slight chance of prices falling a little, I am probably going to sell a couple of my property investments myself, but I would never sell my family home, where would I live?
Markets go up and down, so what, you need somewhere to live

strawb_shortcake

You can lock into a good interest rate for 5 years at the moment, if you can afford to buy now and it's going to be a long term home then why wait? 
How much are you going to spend on renting until you decide it's a safe time time to buy? There will always be a reason not to buy, sometimes you've just got to bite the bullet.

TheCheerleader

You haven’t really provided enough information about your circumstances. 

Are you renting now? Living with parents? Living separately? Have children? Do you need to move near work? 

All these variables are personal to your circumstances and not the next person. 

If you are planning on staying put for 5+ years and love the house then personally I would go ahead, but if you are considering this as a stop gap then calculate the cost of renting v mortgage, solicitors  fees and stamp duty. 

Interest rates are far more likely to drop over the next year and unlikely to go up any time soon.

MARTYM8`

triathlon said:

You have answered the question yourself, this is your first home, where are you going to live if you don't.
Yes you can try and second guess the property market, but just read some of the posts on here and HPC and see how tragically you can waste your life gambling. OK there might be slight chance of prices falling a little, I am probably going to sell a couple of my property investments myself, but I would never sell my family home, where would I live?
Markets go up and down, so what, you need somewhere to live

One might suggest potentially the most significant pandemic in a century might cause a moment's pause - given you are possibly making a lifetime/life changing decision (depending on how big your mortgage commitment is and whether banks carry on lending in the same way in the current climate). 

So I would simply caution the OP e.g. don't take on a bigger mortgage than you can sustainably support. 

silvertooth

cstreet95 said:

Myself and my partner are in the process of buying our first house together. We have not put any money down yet so it would be easy for us to pull out.
After seeing the financial crash this morning and with the unknown of Brexit looming, we are worried that the house price will drop and we will be stuck paying excessive amounts of money for a house that is worth nothing on the housing market.
Does anyone who is more knowledgeable in this area have any advice for us & what we should do?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

It’s looking obvious now we are heading into a financial crash on a global scale

yes you should hold off

next years the world will be vastly different place

lower property prices are a given but this will be the least of your worries

JayRitchie

You need to consider - can you pay the bills on a single income? How far are you stretching to buy? 

RelievedSheff

If you don't buy now where will you live?

If it is in rented property then you need to weigh up how much the rent is going to cost you over that period.

Why pay someone else's mortgage off when you could be paying your own off?

PasturesNew

If you're buying a nice house, buy it, it's your home. 
If you're buying a ratty hole, for fear of missing out forever .... then the worst that can happen is that nothing happens and you miss out and can't buy for another few years, but you're not sitting in a ratty hole at least. 

Like it: Buy it. 
Don't: Don't.

Herzlos

You can still get pretty decent fixed rates for now, which should let you ride out the uncertainty.

One thing to remember is that despite some people ranting about huge price crashes, it's not something that happens over the long term and any reduction in price is usually down to reduction in affordability. So You could hold off a few months, see a 10% drop but be unable to get a mortgage because the lending criteria has become much stricter.

You need to live somewhere, buy as soon as you can and it'll all come out in the wash. It's so much nicer than living with parents or in a rental!

MobileSaver

cstreet95 said:

we are worried that the house price will drop and we will be stuck paying excessive amounts of money for a house that is worth nothing on the housing market.

As others have said, it depends on what your alternatives are if you decide not to buy a house. If you are happy to continue renting or living with family for another year or so then carry on doing so but if you are looking for a long term place to call your own then a temporary blip in house prices should be the least of your concerns.

Whatever you do, do not make the mistake of some posters (e.g. Crashy_Time) of believing you can time the market; he has been renting a bedsit in an undesirable part of Edinburgh for around 20 years because every year he convinces himself that this is the year when house prices will crash and he'll be able to pick up a bargain. The reality of course is that he could literally have paid off a mortgage by now and be living in a rent/mortgage free house in a nice part of town.