Buying A House: C or D?

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).

Tim, I was trying to remember where I heard the story of buyer and seller using same solicitor and it was here! We are going ahead selling part of our land and both have been recommended the same solicitor but seems like there'd be a big conflict of interest so we won't (this is typical, I just was interested about how yours got around it?)

Like I say, they had separate teams working for each party. I think I was relaxed that the sale was relatively simple and they would be concerned enough about their rep (and malpractice!) that they wouldn't mess me about. Probably naïve but it worked for me.

Remodeling costs are also hugely dependent on location -- you can wind up paying like 50-100% more in major cities.

yeah, i was gonna say you could spend 2k in nyc on a sink alone

I don't remember what it priced out to when I looked into a bathroom remodel but it was WAYYY more than 2k. And being in Queens still seems to get you a discount compared to Manhattan/Brownstone Brooklyn.

Yeah I know plenty of people that threw down a lot more, and I get that location is a factor (although I live in Mpls/STpl, so it's not like there's starving contractors fighting to work for free here). Replaced the sink, toilet, added a shower, retiled the floor, added wall tile including glass tile accents etc. but yeah, #1 savings technique other than knowing a dude was doing all the material legwork myself - paying a contractor hourly to go hunt down and math out tile, pick up your sink and toilet etc is a fools game. Only really opulent thing we did was tile related, fixtures are decent but not crazy $$$. $1200 for materials, $800 labor iirc.

Also pro tip - when buying fixtures, use magic phrase "this is not a house flip, this is for me" and peeps at your local hardware store will steer you away from the shittily built cosmetic faux fancy stuff and into well built decent looking stuff for the same price.

I want to say we paid maybe $4k all told for a full remodel of our bathroom, everything stripped to the studs and replaced except for the old tub, including all new drains and supply lines. We bought the materials ourselves and used a single guy contractor who hired out a buddy once in a while for drywalling and such. It took the guy way longer to do the subway tile in the shower than he had expected so we probably got a deal on labor.

It was a really serious amount of plumbing work though, there were maybe four plumbers at our house for like 8 full hours one day

Full-on structural survey - classic or dud? I hear a lot of different things. Some people are very pro, some people say hey, they're still just eyeballing everything and it's a waste of money.

What say you?

Not sure I see the point, unless you have to get one cos something's obviously wrong. They'll just tell you a load of stuff that might need fixing at some unspecified point in the future.

Is there a particular reason why it's been suggested you get one?

Not really. I sort of suspect that the structural engineer my mortgage advisor is recommending is a mate of his. And that a chunk of that £1K+ will kick back to him. Maybe that's cynical.

I sort of want to get one just so that I know The Deal with my house. Like if you buy a used car, you find out its little particularities.

"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)"

This is widely variant depending on where you live, but even a 5x8 bathroom in the Bay Area will run you at least $20k.

And $2k has to mean you are basically doing everything yourself. Because just materials for tile/fixtures/toilet/vanity/tub are going to run you nearly that.

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?

I would assume they're all in cahoots to screw you (or at least, they'll put their own interests first rather than act in yours).

I sort of suspect that the structural engineer my mortgage advisor is recommending is a mate of his. And that a chunk of that £1K+ will kick back to him. Maybe that's cynical.

I don't think that's especially cynical and I wouldn't bother getting a full structural survey unless you've got a specific thing that you're very concerned about. Even the Homebuyer's Report will probably make it sound like the place is going to fall down, but a lot of it is just arse-covering on the part of the surveyor.

Tracer, not sure where you are buying and the age of the property but my parents skimped on a structural survey once and ended up having to have a large section of wall replaced when I was growing up. At least that's how I recall it.

I'd shop around as well although I imagine there aren't many starving chartered surveyors in london right now.

Why on earth do seemingly every British estate agent hold 'open days' to view a property... for which you need an appointment? In what way is this any different from booking a normal appt? An open day is supposed to be for any nosey person who wants to snoop around, surely