Problems selling and best plan

Section62

Herzlos said:

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I don't think m^2 is useful for much beyond quick comparisons and bragging rights, because it doesn't really tell you anything apart from the footprint. 

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I agree, m^2 tells you nothing about shape and utility.  A friend's parent's old house was massive, but it was long and thin.  Three of the bedrooms were in a line and getting to the third of these bedrooms meant walking through the other two.  The floorspace of the bedrooms was enough that on paper you could put in a corridor along one side and still have good sized rooms, but the roof was low (with dormers) and the ceilings were sloping, and so to give the 'corridor' sufficient headroom to let adults use it would mean about a third of the width of the existing bedrooms would be lost to the corridor.  It was also listed.  The £/m^2 figure would have looked very good until you viewed the house in person.

£/m^2 generally works as a metric on new-build which is well designed and conforms to modern norms.  But it becomes much less useful as a comparison of properties built in different eras, or anything which isn't conventional.

ReadySteadyPop

GDB2222 said:

Herzlos said:

I don't buy any of that. 

People get an AIP from their morgage lender, and then look for something they like that they can afford. Almost no-one is going to turn a house down because the cost per square metre is too high, but they will if they can't see themselves living there. 

I'm of course assuming the house is priced sensibly for the market, and disagree with your baseless claim that it's hugely over priced. 

I don’t think that this is entirely logical. On the one hand you say cost per square metre is not important. On the other hand, you say that the house must be priced sensibly. Pretty obviously, one of the key measures of whether a house is priced sensibly is the cost per square metre. 

In any case, it doesn’t matter. The op has reduced the price to the minimum they can afford to take, and the market will decide whether that is too high.

Good points, you can`t have your cake and eat it.

ReadySteadyPop

jimbog said:

GDB2222 said:

Herzlos said:

I don't buy any of that. 

People get an AIP from their morgage lender, and then look for something they like that they can afford. Almost no-one is going to turn a house down because the cost per square metre is too high, but they will if they can't see themselves living there. 

I'm of course assuming the house is priced sensibly for the market, and disagree with your baseless claim that it's hugely over priced. 

Pretty obviously, one of the key measures of whether a house is priced sensibly is the cost per square metre. 

Here in the UK very few people would know the sq meterage of their home or a sensible price per sq metre. More important overseas

I originally said "size" though, not "sq meterage" , most people know the difference between a big flat and a small flat or house without knowing the floor space measurement, they know instinctively if the general size and location are worth the price or if the seller is flying a big kite over the roof, that is why so many houses now get zero viewings.

ReadySteadyPop

Herzlos said:

There are many other factors than floor space, which rarely has much relation to price. 

A large 2 bed may be worth less than a smaller 3 bed. My 4-bed is about 30% bigger than next doors 4-bed, which about twice as much garden. It's worth maybe 5-10% more. 

Price can be affected by all sorts of thing unrelated to just size - plot shape, plot location, room layout, quality of fittings, distance to shops/train/bus/motorway, view, orientation, parking, etc. 

What the typical buyer does is figures out what they need from a house, what they can afford to pay, and then looks for a house that fits the criteria as well as feels like somewhere they can make into a home. It's ultimately somewhere to live and not an investment ledger, so the fuzzy feelings and impressions is a huge factor, and the best way to approach that is to make the house look as appealing as possible from the listing photos. 

Stuff like nearby/historic sales figures has a bit of bearing when it comes to negotiating, but except for a very small subset of recent newbuilds, no two houses are directly comparible for "feel". It doesn't matter if a house half a mile away sold for £10k less if you like this one better.  It doesn't matter how good a deal a house is if you don't like it. 

As I said "size", "price" and "location" basically covers it, add "local amenities" if you want to be more detailed, no one mentioned floor size or sq meterage until you brought it up, people walk through a house and experience if it feels roomy or cramped, they don`t get a tape measure out and do value investor type calculations. The reality is that the UK is stuffed with sellers who can`t get their heads round the fact that the driver of their house price i.e how much people can borrowed has fundamentally changed in the last couple of years.