Buying your first house in the UK in 2007

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%.