Buying A House: C or D?

I would tend to agree.

so we just got a note from our neighbours offering to buy our garage. Is this a good idea? How much are garages? It's over the road from us and pretty derelict, as is their's, which is next to it. We don't use it except for storing wood but in theory we would if we spent a lot of money on fixing the doors, walls, etc.
I'm a bit suspicious they want to build a skyscraper there or something too (or granny annexe).

Unless the price is too good to pass up, it's not worth it. You'd be losing sq ft in your lot, right?

Why not rent it to them at a low rate

And if they want to make upgrades you could take it out of the rent, or go 50/50. Or you could just let them use it for free

i have been preapproved for a mortgage but everytime i think about buying something i feel like a horrible fraud

polyphonic's advice sounds right

I was quoted $20K as the value a garage adds to your property in Seattle.

Just replaced a 40 year old window that decided to crack all on its own last fall. We had been holding it together with duct tape.

Part of our sunporch roof caved in following some torrential storms around xmas. Still waiting to hear back from the insurance company about whether they'll cover that one.

Some of the screws holding the back door to the hinges have become stripped. That's an easy fix, but it was a sad feeling to have my door fall off into my hands.

Renting wouldn't work because they want to either knock through to enlarge & do up their garage, or use the land, which is otherwise in their garden, for something else.
I think we'll have to ask an estate agent plus mortgage providers (as it could devalue the property). Going to talk to the neighbs about what they have in mind...

Might be different in the UK (? -- "estate agent"), but in N America there'd be a clear distinction between the value of the garage itself (the outbuilding) and the land it sits on (part of your property).

Over here, most municipalities won't let you sell off part of your property (the land being divided into lots, and each lot with a title establishing ownership). Unless your garage is on a different lot from your house (might be, if they're across the road from each other), it would be difficult to sell one without the other.

Selling your garage and the title to the land it sits on would certainly devalue your property, because you'd be left with less property to value.

If you're able and willing to sell that piece of land, a fair price would reflect the opportunity to build in that location, not just its current use. Empty lots and lots with derelict buildings can and do exchange hands for high prices because of the potential to develop there, a projected future value quite distinct from its current situation.

We moved into the condo yesterday! (Internet set up today!)

Congrats!! What was your obligatory take-out meal?

Huh, I always assumed you could parcel off bits of your land here (UK) to sell as you please, but I'm not actually certain. We don't really have 'lots' but I wonder how much red tape is involved. Garages have gone for insane prices around here - parking is notoriously hard, but they have recently brought in a decent parking scheme which seems to be working - and ppl use them as workshops etc. However in our direct area there's a bit of a recent trend of using them for developing and building whole (small) properties on, which neighbours object to. Yay inner-city living!

Pepperoni pizza and champagne! :)

Huh, I always assumed you could parcel off bits of your land here (UK) to sell as you please, but I'm not actually certain.

I don't know any of the details, I'm afraid, but my parents bought part of next door's garden in the UK. It had a little wedge-shaped bit round a corner which wasn't visible from the neighbour's house but would have been from theirs, so they offered some money to just have the fence go straight.

weird, that's very similar to what my in-laws are doing except they're kind of swapping bits of land.

this is probably a dumb question but can anybody explain to me why estate agents still exist now that we have the internet? i don't need a travel agent to book me tickets, i don't need a b 'n' b agent to book me a b 'n' b, i don't need a personal shopper when i can buy everything online and do all the comparisons myself. everyone HATES estate agents. why isn't there a website that simply puts buyers and sellers together?

btw what do people make of plaistow? west ham? forest gate?

gonna put that on the london thread. would still like to know why estate agents still exist

to artificially inflate house prices?

Estate agents don't just do house sales - a lot do property management. You'll also need to arrange valuations, surveys, conveyancing, etc and, in some situations, physical marketing (in the form of for sale signs, newspaper adverts, etc) as well which i imagine would be a pain for a lot of people to do independently.

Mine basically ensured my flat got sold despite the best intentions of the shitty solicitors involved and sabotaging neighbours. That was because we went for decent yet more pricey ones. The majority are lazy idiots, so I dunno about those. They do the work of arranging viewings etc I suppose. Even that's not certain- I was present at a viewing of my place I was renting out and had to fill in lots of good selling points that the agent had forgotten.

when the flat next to mine was for sale i had so many agents trying to open MY door that i ended up putting a note by the keyhole. they were earning 1000s of pounds commission for selling a flat they couldn't even find.

It's generally much better to go for a smaller, local estate agent rather than a Foxtons / Bairstow Eves, etc, where possible.

Bro-in-law's (first) house purchase has just fallen through, with only approx a month or so to go, because one of the vendors was killed over the weekend.

Is "estate agent" the same thing that we in the US call "Real Estate Agent" or "Real Estate Broker"?

I find their continued existence completely absurd when it comes to rentals, but I do sort of see their value in a purchase -- it's a complex process, and it also helps to know the market. I mean we did our purchase without one, using an app called Redfin to stay on top of listings and the market, but I was obsessive about it. We also already lived in the neighborhood where we bought, making it easy to schedule viewings.

A good broker can do stuff like tell you right away why a certain listing is too good to be true, why it might not be worth your time to look at a certain place because of some location issue, whether your offer is in line with the market, whether the market is likely to be receptive to lowball offers, etc. not to mention how to put together all the paperwork.

yeah i wouldn't have done that well without one. it's like they do all the parts that suck. i would have procrastinated for years.

I was checking listings several times a day, every day, for about six months. I looked at for-sale listings as well as sold listings, so I could feel out not only asking prices but actual selling prices and how big the discounts were. I got to know the various buildings, sub-neighborhoods, I got a feel for what factors seemed to drive price in the area. When a new listing that looked appealing came up, I was often literally the first person to call. If you don't have the time or personality to do this, a broker can definitely be useful.

OTOH we were given the advice that when you don't come with a buyer's broker, that may gain you favor with the seller's broker (who gets more commission for her/himself that way), which can in turn mean they'll push for you. I think it can also mean you get a better price -- I don't exactly understand the mechanics, but I THINK the idea is that let's say normally the price includes 6% commission for the brokers to be split between buyers' broker and sellers' broker. Well if there's only one broker, the price can drop a little, the sellers' broker can take say 4 or 5%, the sellers still keep the same amount and everyone comes out ahead.

Our real estate agent showed us at least a dozen places, each one a bit more fine-tuned to our liking based on our feedback, and ended up showing us the house we ended up buying before it officially went on the market because she knew what we were looking for. We put in a bid before it appeared online or had a "for sale" sign outside. I wasn't quite happy to give her a lot of money but it at least felt like she performed a useful service for us.

We're looking to move to a bigger house in the next year and I can't imagine not using an agent to help us sell it. Doing everything myself - advertising, setting up showings, dealing with paperwork - to save a couple grand just doesn't seem worth it.

UK system is quite different from US iirc - they are always on the side of the seller in the UK.

well that was quick. offer accepted! now wth do i do

RUN AWAY!

Congrats! Touching wood for painless process!

Where?

it's a sort of scuffy area between stratford and leyton.

i like it.

10 minutes walk to leyton tube and about 12 minutes to the westfield spaceship, should i ever want to go there. and 5 minutes to the weird empty city of towerblocks that have been built, like some kind of model of how people will live once we get to venus.

so people are saying i need a solicitor and i need to get them "on the case" immediately. god help me.

it's a freehold, by the way. i met the owner today, seems like a nice dude. he's owned it for 4 years. it's got a big garden in the back. tempting to knock down the back wall and double the size of the kitchen which, given the wherewithal, wouldn't even cut into the garden too much.

saw places in brighton last weekend that put this place to shame, but couldn't face the 1.5 hr commute each way.

still sort of shocked that i've found a place so quickly, and that i'm not having to live in, i dunno south woodford. nothing against south woodford, obviously.

what do ppl think about using a cheap n dirty internet solicitor for this stuff?

Congratulations! Will you be in... Maryland?

not far!! i like that. that's what i'm gonna say. it's maryland.

"forget it, jake. it's maryland."

I used a cheap and dirty internet solicitor for my purchase (and sale) last year - I wouldn't have gone there necessarily through choice (my estate agent wanted to use them for the sale and it seemed easier, plus their rates were pretty good) and I couldn't fault them, they were better than the people I used the time I bought before that.

PM me and I'll pass on their details.

estate agent also runs a solicitor service, and they say the seller is using them. they say it would be "brilliant" if we also used them. it sounds tempting, i.e. could make everything quicker and go more smoothly but what if they're all somehow in cahoots to screw us?

estate agent is being incredibly emollient, i.e. "you all seem like such a nice family" etc etc. which of course makes me think they're totally trying to screw us. am i through the looking glass? maybe a spade is a spade?

That would depend on the agency. Is it a small local one, or part of a better-known chain?

congratulations

they're pretty local - http://www.tjballpropertyservices.co.uk/

thanks nakh

being incredibly superstitious about this, though, people talk about this shit taking months

i also obv feel incredibly lucky to be able to afford the deposit on a place in this most expensive city, at perhaps the apex of its expensiveness

When I was in your position the estate agents gave me a list of their recommended solicitors that I could ring round and check for prices and so on - they didn't try to push me towards one or another. I added a few local ones onto my list because that seemed honourable.

I wound up picking the one with the best balance of responsive / cheap and then it turned out that the seller (who I later discovered used to work for the estate agent) had chosen the same one.

I asked for reassurances that there would be a team working for me with the necessary separation from the team working for the seller, which I duly received to my satisfaction (goodness knows what "my satisfaction" consisted of back then; I think they just reassured me and it seemed OK, Chinese walls in place etc, and I think I got this in writing).

Once that was the case I was super-happy with the service, and was happy never to hear the phrase "we're waiting for a response from the buyer's solicitor", which I'd heard a lot about.

That's my story.

More a house-owning than house-buying question but ... how much would you need to set aside to replace a small-ish bathroom? (ie. replace bath/sink/toilet/tiles - and get someone to do this)

hugely dependent on how fancy you want the fixtures to be, and even more so on how fancy your tile gets.

we spent $2k on ours, but thats def on the cheap side, done by a close acquaintance and with me doing all the purchasing and design myself (pro tip - shop for your own tile, markup via contractor on that shit can be HUGE).