Chain issues/ probate

Booge

Hi all

i posted about this previously. I agreed to buy a house in outer London back in April and have since then had problems with the upper chain. The people my sellers are buying from was an elderly lady with daughter trying to sell the house without power of attorney and was applying to court of protection for deputyship and permission to sell house. I was told everything was ready to go when I put in the offer and none of this came up. 

As of yesterday elderly lady has now died,  so house will need to go through probate. 

I had been looking for other properties, but I’ve been finding great difficulty finding anything decent in this area, as the demand is still there but as we come out of the stamp duty holiday the supply of new homes has dwindled. 

My main concern is the increasing prices. I’m not desperate to move for it’s own sake, but I’m concerned that if something goes wrong or they change their mind, I will be left with prices having increased again. The news keeps reporting that house prices in London have only increased by 4% year on year and that we have lowest rate of increase but that’s a very different picture between inner and outer London when you look at it. The areas I need to live in have increased up to 15% in a single year as people in flats in inner London look to buy houses with gardens in outer London and the demand for houses is huge. 

The market is absolutely red hot, with most properties that come onto the market having something wrong with them, eg next to commercial premises, backing onto a building site, on a main road with huge amounts of traffic, tiny scullery style kitchens that can’t be extended, or having a tube line or HS2 running at the back of the garden. This is for £700-750k. When the odd property that is suitable comes up once in about every 3 weeks, 30 people immediately get listed to view it and it sells on the same day. 

My general observation of the market in London is that people are now staying put in the middle of the market, possibly because the next rung of the ladder is now out of their reach. There are a huge number of people trying to move from flats to semis, but very few people in semis moving up to bigger houses, producing a “crunch” in the middle of the market. 

Meanwhile the property I am waiting for is a good one, but I’m worried they will ask to increase the price once the probate is sorted. I’ve done IHT and probate myself on my grandads estate, which took 6 months, though I’m now advised that the processing times have improved somewhat. 

What would readers do? Wait for the probate house to get sorted or continue looking? 

Booge. 

Ally_E.

Continue looking while waiting for the probate house. You don't need to pull out to look for another house, just keep both things going and decide what to do when you find something just as good.