Buying your first house in the UK in 2007

i am translating "cheap" in your question to actually mean "even vaguely affordable", is that about right?

Yeah, pretty much. We can afford up to about £150k. Exeter's an odd market, though, cos it's small.

if you're looking at this mainly as an investment there's a football club around there that could use the money...

Yeah, but living in a football stadium would be rubbish. You'd have to bath with the players on a Saturday.

'investment'

'football club'

hahahahahahahaha

'investment'

'housing market'

'2007'

hahahahaha

When I was looking for a flat I asked the estate agent not to show me ex-council properties - less snobbery than not wanting to live in the middle of an estate (okay, snobbery then). In the end, the one ex-council flat I was shown was the one I bought - sizeable, solid and $15k cheaper than anything like it.

i dunno about exeter tbh, so you'll have to judge the prices. look at ourproperty.co.uk to see past prices on the surrounding streets for comparison. check out the rental prices for the same type of place in the same type of area as well, because they cant stay out of whack for ever

id choose a house over a flat if its possible, id choose a shabby place in a nice street over a nice place in a shabby street, i wouldnt buy a new build, id remember that if a place needs work doing its usually not that much money, it just seems a hassle is all

id make sure your mortgage multiple isnt excessive, id get a longer fixed rate as you'll only have to spend ££ arranging another fix in 2 years otherwise, and theyll say when you spread the arrangement fee over 25-30 years its nothing, but its only to get you the initial period, so its actually spread over 2 years - also if you take a fixed rate out of less than 5 years, id make sure you could pay the mortgage if interest rates were 10% instead of 5.5%

id make sure you have the facility to overpay the mortgage to bring the capital down, but i wouldnt necessarily do that. rates are going up and yours will be fixed, so you might be better putting hte rest of your money in high interest savings, then overpaying in bulk periodically

and dont bank on prices going up, esp outside of london.

and itll cost a lot of money to actually buy, solicitors, surveys, stamp duty etc, more than you think!

and if youve got the sizeable deposit, you might not want to put it all down. as above you might be better with a good portion of it in savings, and the ability to overpay it at any point, the interest you will get in savings (certainly ISAs) will be better than the interest saved on the mortgage (might have to look into tax stuff here though)

Thanks for all this!

i wouldnt listen a thing the estate agent says it will basically be lies, dont offer the asking price unless its really amazing, certainly dont put in above, offer what you think, dont be afraid to offer 10%+ below, dont feel pressured to cave. not many buyers in summer. get your mortgage sorted out early, dont be scared to pull out if something better comes along. money lost on a survey is a pittance compared to the price of a house. so keep looking for other places even if you have offer accepted. remember you hold more cards than you think you do. they only have one house to sell you have a million you can buy. a victorian place is less likely to be subject to the vagaries of the market. dont subject your neighbours to Embrace.

if you see an occupied place you will see it at its best. a vacant place is kind of better because you see it as it really is

Gareth said you'll only have to spend ££ arranging another fix in 2 years otherwise

You don't necessarily have to pay. I renegotiate every 2 years and have done so around 5 times without paying a penny. You can usually either transfer to whatever their latest discounted rate is (what I do), or switch to another provider, who will often pay transfer fees to get your business. Adnittedly there might be surveyors fees involved in this too, but I have heard of them being paid/waived.

id make sure you have the facility to overpay the mortgage to bring the capital down, but i wouldnt necessarily do that. rates are going up and yours will be fixed, so you might be better putting hte rest of your money in high interest savings, then overpaying in bulk periodically

OTM, but you would need to have a fair amount of cash sloshing about to get really really good investment rates. As for overpaying in bulk - check what the maximum amount (per month/per year) is - there are often penalty fees.

The last time we remortaged a VERY NICE PERSON told us that by law there has to be provision for you to overpay by 6(?) months repayments or 10% of the outstanding mortgage (whichever is greater) every year, but most companies FOR SOME STRANGE REASON don't advertise this or try and charge you for it as an extra.

Haha, the place we looked at on Saturday was occupied and totally NOT at its best! But that guy was a fucking spacecake.

yes i think most overpayment mortgages allow 10%, but if interest rates continue to rise (which surely they must, they're still very low), then putting money elsewhere will look a better option

See lots of places.

Don't (and I'm not suggesting that you will!) do what a lot of people do - which is to invent a fantasy property that is based on the best features of the houses that they have seen, and to search fruitlessly until you find it, which you won't. You can only buy what'e for sale.

Don't take notice of decor - you can easily make a place look how you want.

When you see a place that you really want, chances are that lots of other people will want it to. You will have to stay on top of every detail of the process every flippin' minute of every day until you have secured it (i.e exchanged contracts). The estate agent will lie and not return your calls, the solicitor will lie and not return your calls and the everyone else involve will....you get the idea. The way that you win dream home is to be one step ahead of these lying b'stards who cannot operate a telephone all the time.

A good idea is to try and forge a personal relationship with the seller, get to know them and show them that you're serious and trustworthy. They will often stick by you if there are delays and hitches, which there WILL BE!

Watch out for this : You put in an offer. It is accepted. But the lying b'stard estate agent is still marketing the property to try and get a higher offer. He can then play you off against the other party to maximise his commission and get the best price. This is not illegal, but is unethical. I know some really nasty tricks to make the estate agent's life difficult and waste their precious time if this happens, but it will probably mean that you won't be able to buy another property from that estate agent, unless you do it very subtly. Hopefully this won't happen to you.

When you look at properties try and find out as much about the seller as possible and what their reasons for selling are. There are quite a few people who put their houses up for sale, but have no real incentive or motivation to move - they just kinda fancy moving if their dream home comes up for sale. It won't, so don't waste any effort on them.

You can put in more than one offer at once. I once had 5 in at once.

You are a not selling a property (that's right, innit?) so are in a great position to move fast. That will give you an advantage over many buyers.

Oh and Nick......good luck!

A good idea is to try and forge a personal relationship with the seller, get to know them and show them that you're serious and trustworthy. They will often stick by you if there are delays and hitches, which there WILL BE!

This is bastard important!

We're not selling, aye. It's kind of scary but kind of exciting, too. We're looking at a couple on Wednesday morning.

Hoorah for (almost) being a homeowner!

I guess a lot of the home-buyer laws and things are different in Scotland, but we put in the offer on our flat subject to survey. The survey was fine, the offer was accepted and every day I thank God we were so lucky on our first attempt.

(We bought in December '06 so I nearly apply for this thread :)

And Dr C - OTM about looking past the decor, Mr thought this was going to cause me problems when we initially spent hours on property websites such as GSPC etc.

I was put off by nasty fireplaces, bad flooring, ugly tiles until we actually viewed the flat we had now and fell in love with it's potential and location, despite it's horrific fireplace and massacre red walls.

Yeah, it's not decor you have to worry about, it's 40-y-o heating systems and wiring. Not only will you not be able to live with it, you won't be able to sell the place when you eventually decide to move. Some people might say that you shouldn't even consider buying places like that, considering the expense and upheaval of getting stuff of that nature done once you've moved in and, having gone through it, I'd be inclined to agree with them. Still, only 16 months on and we're about to start on the kitchen (which still has pocket of brick dust from the May '06 rewire...). At least my 2-y-o has a nice room.

OTM

My boiler packed in a few days after moving in. Consider reserving some of that deposit money for an overhaul of things like the heating system, wiring, windows. So much easier to do before you move in. Check for things like pipes running through concrete floors in 60s/70s housing (and some earlier and later), my boss found this out to his cost recently when a pipe burst that was embedded in the concrete (no barrier between the copper and the corrosive concrete) and had to rip apart his entire living room and re-route all of the plumbing.

Also if you do do the heating system, look at getting the highest efficiency you can as by the time you come to sell efficiency will definitely be in the HIP and might be factored into stamp duty etc. Look at condensing boilers, Micro CHP, solar pre-heat, biomass etc. In theory there are grants for this shit but they are hard to get. (don't forget loft lagging and Cavity wall as well).

I don't agree that you should be put off by work that needs doing (unless it's unliveable). The only way we could afford our lovely flat in a gorgeous area was because it was the skankiest building in the row and didn't have central heating, was in pretty bad nick etc - as this is generally a posher area I think the price was relatively low because most people looking in that area expect to pay for a nice/modern finish. Actually paying the deposit etc really took it out of us financially but once you're back on your feet you can make upgrades as and when.
First thing we did was put central heating in, next on list is replace old holey rattly windows. You can do it at your own pace which is cool as long as you're planning to stay there long enough for it to be worthwhile.

I'd be interested as to where you end up in Exeter, as it doesn't seem to have the huge scale of type of prices/properties you get in bigger cities.

The thing about our place is that it wasn't yr archetypal fixer-upper - it was a quite well-maintained 1951 semi that had been home to the same family since the mid-'60s. They'd somehow raised four kids there with a single gas fire in the lounge and slightly dubious-looking gas heaters in the hall and on the landing (one hadn't worked for months); oh, and an immersion heater for the hot water. There was only one socket in each room and, while the kitchen had wiring that seemed to date from the early '90s (though done badly, as our GCH engineer discovered when he drilled through some strangely-situated cables), the rest of the house (judging by the fusebox under the stairs) was certainly '60s or earlier. They were on a card meter too.

I mean, what you've never had you don't miss, and it obviously was fine for them (I grew up with even less mod cons than this), but we felt we needed to get radiators on the walls and some modern switchgear under the the stairs (we had a NICEIC report done and it was borderline unsafe). We did the floors too, installed patio doors (again it comes from expectation - you have a lovely patio and you just...look at it through this little window? You have to walk round the side of the house to get to it?) and decorated every room.

We went horribly over-budget (and had a second kid in the meantime) and still have the kitchen (post-rewire plasterer sort of "forgot" to fill in the chased-in cables and the installation of the boiler wiped out a lot of storage; floor, worktops, cabinets, sink, layout = ugh) and the garden (nearing jungle status, dangerous steps, collapsing walls).

Sometimes I wonder why we bought this place but then I look in the paper and see the prices for comparable properties in this area and think we might've done quite well.

i like your gaff jonesy

going to the back of the garden is like tackling Snowdon

we had similar with ours, just stupid little things like the previous owner had run an extra plug socket off the cooker fuse so the bloke who was fitting the kitchen wouldn't reattach it, so i had to get a sparky in who took one look at the fusebox and said "you'll be having a new one then" and bang, there goes £500...

we are contemplating moving again, but the whole thing gives me the screaming effing abdabs.

i keep being told not to buy a new build - why is this? i'm currently renting a room in a 20-year-old ex-yuppie new build and it's by no means falling apart. new build advice/experiences would be appreciated, also some justification from the nay-sayers (gareth?).

:) I like it my gaff too - I just wish I could spend more time enjoying the place rather than reworking it. After the kitchen and the garden, you know there'll be something else (carport? Shed?). This is the lot of the cash-strapped homeowner, I suppose. Little-by-little, make it your own, do as much as you can yourself.

charlie, i think 20 year old is probably not too bad, it's the brand new stuff that is:

a. tiny
b. gardenless
c. built by poles for 20p an hour

if a house/flat is edwardian it's clearly built to last ;)

What do you guys think of this?

http://www.bradleys-estate-agents.co.uk/properties-sales-brdrps-EXE060293-1181220400

I know you're not going to know the area, but... it's very central, quite busy, but two floors up and the lower, quieter and of a busy street wioth lots of pubs and boutiques and so on at the top end. If you know Bristol it's like a mini Park Street equivalent.

What would be the problematic issues you'd look for with this property?

Build quality on most of the new builds in our village is very poor, possibly that's why people caution against one?

Gareth's advice seems good.

Smaller house in better area is much better than larger property in undesirable area. Whatever it is that makes the underirable area so is something you'll have to live w/for a good few years.

DUDE, it's above a tat shop, BUY IT!!!

i'd certainly look carefully at the state of the sash windows, on the second floor they wll be a BUGGER to replace. wonder why there's no pics of the bathroom...

also, is there a window in the kitchen? it almost looks like there isn't...

Also, check where the Chinese next door vents its kitchen.

The kitchen is open-plan with the living space, so windows at front. We're looking at it on Wednesday morning, and also this one; http://www.bradleys-estate-agents.co.uk/properties-sales-brdrps-BNH070414-1181552579

Jonesy take note of what's downstairs...

Re. the tat-shop one; the first-floor one, almost same dimensions but laid out differently (living smaller, second bedroom larger), is also on the market, but at £152,000. The area's undesirable because there's a Walkabout bar 300 yards up the road which is frequented by squaddies and students, and a gaggle of other pubs too. No allocated parking, put residents permit parking nearby. Very convenient for town, campus, train stations, etcetera.

Has no-one really not said location, location, location, yet?

Think about when you want to sell it on. Which may seem daft but put yourselves in the shoes of the seller now. They're probably playing up the 'quiet' aspects. When we sold our last house all everyone asked us about noise and neighbours. People want a bit of a quiet (at least some of the time). The houses in our road keep on going up and people keep buying 'em because it's a quiet cul-de-sac with a field at the end, and despite the fact it's in an unfashionable part of the unfashionable east midlands.

The second one is above a hi-fi shop so expect noise during shop hours obv. The first one seems to belong to a surfer dude. I don't know if this is good or bad.

Also ask them why they're moving. Then sue them later when they lie.

The first one is on a lease. I've never bought anything on a lease. Does it matter?

I can probably match the hi-fi shop for noise, if needed.

But they'll be playing all those over-compressed CDs!

Not when I live upstairs, they wont.

also living above subway = entire flat smelling of proving bread forever (a bad thing, in my opinion)

Yep. Lots of Brits, Germans, Dutch buying in Brittany, Normandy. Still incredibly cheap there compared to the other side of the channel.

Can anyone trace the origins of the UK's obsession with home ownership?

I would guess the whole 'right to buy' thing for council tennants coupled with the 80s boom in house prices.

We're pretty much unique in Europe in this regard - my friends in Germany and France just laugh at the insane amounts of lifelong debt we Brits gleefully sign ourselves up for, while they live in lovely long-term lease not wildly expensive properties - and (if possible) slowly save for a holiday home for their dotage.

Those aren't the choices facing people in Britain. My mortgage isn't substantially different from what my rent was, so it's not necessarily costing me (much) more to 'own' a flat. In thirty-odd years time I'll have to retire and take a massive cut in my income. Rent/Mortgage has always been my biggest expense - hopefully it will be paid off when I retire, whereas if I was still renting I would have to keep paying until I died.

the thing that bemuses me right now is interest-only mortgages being sold to people. that way people what people would have paid off in capital they can now invest somewhere else.

of course the logical extension of this argument is that if you rented you would have even more money to invest this way as rent will be lower than the interest on a mortgage

ie for the above to actually work house prices must continue to grow faster than wages... for the length of your mortgage

Is that true, though? I would have said rent was higher than an interest-only mortgage, but lower than a repayment mortgage. (xpost)

i think rent and interest only are kind of comparable, but you have to factor in, that with rent, your deposit is still in the bank getting interest, with an interest only your deposit is gone

True. Another factor: your mortgage repayments would stay the same every month for 20-30 years (well, they'd go up and down in line with the interest rate, but they would stay broadly the same in nominal terms and would gradually fall in real terms), whereas your rent will rise in line with inflation. So even if, for example, they're both £700 a month in 2007, by 2030 the mortgage might still be £700, but the rent could be £3,000 a month.

absolutely true, and this is the argument for buying in a nutshell, some pain now but win out in the longer term, right?

but it also requires that property increases of more than 5% a year continue for all of those 23 years, something which is..debatable. if you put your money somewhere else for those 23 years (or perhaps for 6-8 of those 23 years) it may well grow faster than it would have done in your hosue, offsetting your increased rent. houses have been the best place to put it for the last 10 years (not the last two if you live in the north though), doesnt mean that is the default best place

also rents have remained static for pretty much all of the latter half of the boom (though you are right, they are likely to start rising in the next 2 years)

also when rates are low money is cheap, disincentive to save, as assets rise faster than money. if rates go high, then the opposite will be true

unless we're going to go 70s style

Hi. Tell me about extending the lease on a leasehold flat.

Ours is down to 80 years or so, so we should do something about it. Asked the solicitors of the freeholder about extending or possibility of buying freehold and got very curt response with a no to buying and a request for £117 to value the lease.

Anyone know roughly how much they are going to charge us? Are they going to use this as an opportunity to massively increase the ground rent? Are they allowed to just say no to a request to buy the freehold?

Ta.

Also, I like blueski's attitude, despite my home-owning, cat-owning, parent, bourgeois existence.

By the time we pay the mortgage off, we'd get housing benefit for rent anyway.

The main problem I had with renting was the insecurity, having to move every 12 months or so for one reason or another. That and not being able to screw things in walls. The first thing I did when we bought our flat was go to Argos and get an electric drill and make holes in the wall. Happy days.

I'm still too scared to make holes in the walls. But I did paint all the walls purple and fuchsia.

God, reading this thread is just like being at work. ARGH!

i've only ever rented yet i put holes in walls with abandon - that's what the walls are there for!

You're right. Thye're gonna keep your deposit anyway. Damn my timidity!

Jamie, good luck extending your lease.... We gave up in the end and sold ours with a 62 year lease, as they were asking £17K to extend. We obviously could have contested and even gone to the leasehold tribunal, but we just wanted to sell.

http://www.lease-advice.org/ is your friend, everything you've ever wanted to know about extending your lease, and lots more besides. It should answer your questions above - they can't refuse to sell you the freehold; legally it's set out how much extending the lease/buying the freehold should cost, but it involves getting a valuation as it involves the difference in value between the flat now and the flat with an extended lease/freehold etc; and legally they can't increase the ground rent, though they'll give it a bloody good try.

Fill the holes up with toothpaste when you leave.

Jamie, spackle and white paint is very cheap

Colgate, even cheaper </person you'd never want to rent to>

So did you have trouble selling with a 62-year lease? I thought mortgage companies were iffy on lending on properties with less than a 75 (or 70, can't remember) lease.

Will check out that site. Cheers.

17K? Ouch!

thats interesting that its so much just to extend the lease. wonder how much it would be to get a share of the freehold

not looked at this at all, but it seems the only reason to charge so much would be to discourage renewal thereby devaluing the leasehold flat with the hope of picking it up cheap when the leasehold flat owner eventually moves on (because the freeholder would now be the only person for who the leasehold flat now represents an attractive deal)

?

what about 'No More Nails'?

They didn't seem to have a problem getting a mortgage, nor did we when we bought it 4 years previously. We didn't have as much interest in it as we would have if there hadn't been a problem with the lease, but it didn't take that long to shift it.

It's crazy really. The estate agents reach the asking price by taking off how much it would cost to extend the lease from the price they'd value it at with a good lease. But the way to work out the lease extension price is to half the difference between the value as it is now against how much it would be worth with the extended lease.... chicken/egg situation. We paid for a valuation and it came back at £8K, but our solicitor messed up serving notice on the freeholder but didn't realise or tell us until three months later, so we didn't have time to go through the official channels to wear the freeholder down.

It's not that much more to buy the freehold, but you have to have the other flat/flats agree to it too - you can't just buy your own. We were terraced upstairs downstairs so could have bought the freehold with downstairs, but they weren't interested and we couldn't afford to buy the freehold for both.

The freeholder asks for so much money because they know people are too scared to not extend the lease and don't know what their rights are and don't realise that there's an act of parliament been passed which sets out the criteria for extending the lease, including how to work out how much it costs. So people fork out the cash because they don't realise there's an alternative.

http://www.lease-advice.org/decisions/pdf/1450_dir/1450_page1.htm

^ this one came out at 17k also

No more nails is good for skirting boards, not picture hanging.

£17k to buy the freehold for 4 flats, which would make it £4,250 for each flat to buy their freehold, I'd go for that!

oh yes, didnt notice there were 4, and it was for freehold

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7598.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7632.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7620.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7607.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7615.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7646.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7639.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7604.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7606.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7608.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Places/IMG_7611.jpg

Oh wow! Congratulations. Looks fantastic!

It looks great - and echo the congratulations.

Slightly envious that when I got my first flat in the 90s, I moved in with a CD/radio 'beatbox' and an air-mattress - no computers, no widescreen TV, no expensive stereo, no over-filled wine-rack.

Nearly five years later, we're selling.

http://www.naomijryan.co.uk/content/sale/st-leonards6.ashx

Good luck! I love maisonettes. Our experience with our crazy neighbours who share our building means we're determined to get an actual house next. Where are you looking to move to?

Still in Exeter, and ideally just around the corner. We'll probably not be able to afford that, though, so will almost certainly head a mile or so further out.

Our wine rack was never that full again.

We got offered asking price. Which we didn't expect.

Good stuff. Tbf, based on those pics you got the place looking great whilst you were there. How's the house search going?

I like the idea of this thread as a form of time travel. If I read the whole thing I will know exactly how to buy a house in the UK in 2007.

We've viewed six so far, with another five or six booked to view over the next few days. Em is in love with one of them but it's at the top of our budget... It is a very nice house though, and one we could stay in for a decade or more. It'd take teenage kids. (We have no kids right now!)

Just done various phonecalls and we've now officially accepted, providing we can find somewhere to bid on in a timely fashion! Which shoudn't be a problem.

Crazy madness.

Congratulations! Go for the one you love I reckon.

Oops, this whole thread is excellent, I'm all ashamed of my glib contribution now. Will memorise for future reference.

There's one more that I'm viewing tomorrow morning (Emma's working) which I've got high hopes for, but I've booked a second viewing on the one we fell in love with for Monday morning, and told them we've had an offer accepted. Which made the agent excited!

But yeah, I reread much of this thread yesterday, and it is really awesome.

congrats

Just been re-reading loads of my posts on this thread from 5 years ago which I have no memory of making. In case anyone's been on tenterhooks for 5 years, I can reveal: my gamble on variable rates paid off massively as interest rates fell to the floor and stayed there, and Ned T Rifle was right - there was no way on earth they were ever going to rise to 10%.