House Prices

[JoeBloggs]

Do you know about buying the lease? My parents said they’d buy it for me, can they do that?

You cannot buy it but you can extend it. The same applies, after you have own the property for two years you have the legal right to buy a statutory lease extension of 99 years.

It gets valued and then you can negotiate. You need to pay for the valuation. I can’t see why they can’t pay for it. Provided they don’t pass within 7 years it can be gifted to you with no tax implications.

 

[heretoreaditall2019]

I think someone previously in this thread said about houses selling before being online as the estate agent was sending info out to people beforehand.
Someone in my family who has died their daughter was emptying the house and someone saw her doing this. They went up to her and offered to buy the house, this was well before covid, but she hadn’t even contacted an estate agents about selling.

Thank you, that makes sense! It’s a bit rubbish as internal images help benchmark just cos the quality of property here is so poor, like it’s either a 1960s number or maybe 90s if you’re lucky, very few modernised properties available.

Obvs not that I see my home as an investment or something I want to profit from, we are just keen to move now tbh

 

[Anne1448]

Yeah, it sounds like a private sale to me. If your house is in a sought-after neighbourhood, if you have a good network, a buyer lined up or a good agent usually houses are sold like that.

The "For sale" sign is put when there is no buyer lined up. So, the agency or the seller has to draw attention to it publicly.

 

[Former_Antelopee]

You cannot buy it but you can extend it. The same applies, after you have own the property for two years you have the legal right to buy a statutory lease extension of 99 years.

It gets valued and then you can negotiate. You need to pay for the valuation. I can’t see why they can’t pay for it. Provided they don’t pass within 7 years it can be gifted to you with no tax implications.

I’ve read you can buy it and have the right to (usually after 2years)? Anyway I’ll find out from solictor soon

 

[heretoreaditall2019]

Yeah, it sounds like a private sale to me. If your house is in a sought-after neighbourhood, if you have a good network, a buyer lined up or a good agent usually houses are sold like that.

The "For sale" sign is put when there is no buyer lined up. So, the agency or the seller has to draw attention to it publicly.

I’ve mentioned before property only tends to become available here when someone dies tbh and the quality is therefore really poor. Their house had been modernised so is a rarity so not really surprised it went so quickly, shocked it wasn’t so much as listed online though! And frustrating as any similar property won’t have details on zoopla for us to create a range with? :/

There’s another one for sale on our road now but it’ll require a good double digit percentage of its price’s worth of work doing to it as it’s a probate sale.

 

[JoeBloggs]

I’ve read you can buy it and have the right to (usually after 2years)? Anyway I’ll find out from solictor soon

Buying the freehold and extending a lease are not the same. You cannot buy a lease.

You have the right to lease extension after two years, it’s know as a statutory lease extension but only the right to buy the freehold if they offer it for sale.

 

[Tublet83]

Also to add not all leaseholds are bad, I live in 1950s surburban semi estate that was built as all leasehold, no fees to pay etc as it’s a peppercorn rent. Mine is actually freehold because the previous owner bought it, but most of the houses are still leasehold and have a large amount of years left.

Your issue comes with buying a less with a short amount of years and you can’t get a mortgage on it and service charges on newer leasehold properties

 

[littlepup]

I’ve mentioned before property only tends to become available here when someone dies tbh and the quality is therefore really poor. Their house had been modernised so is a rarity so not really surprised it went so quickly, shocked it wasn’t so much as listed online though! And frustrating as any similar property won’t have details on zoopla for us to create a range with? :/

There’s another one for sale on our road now but it’ll require a good double digit percentage of its price’s worth of work doing to it as it’s a probate sale.

Do you mean you want to see other properties so you can value your own? Online details can be very, very misleading. The pics won’t show up damp or subsidence etc nor tell you if the seller wants a quick sale or is in a big chain so unless you’ve been in the property and spoken to the agent it’s hard to narrow it down. Obviously there’s a rough ceiling price you can work to but what something is advertised for and what it sells for can be really different and if you wait for the sold price to come onto zoopla the price market have changed - certainly at the moment.
Just get a few agents round to value. It’s no obligation and even if you do put your house on the market you always want a few agents to value so they’re more than used to valuing without it becoming a listing.

 

[mindlessness]

The local agents might also know through the grapevine how much the neighbours place went for @heretoreaditall2019 ? In my experience agents are real gossips - may as well take advantage of that

 

[heretoreaditall2019]

Do you mean you want to see other properties so you can value your own? Online details can be very, very misleading. The pics won’t show up damp or subsidence etc nor tell you if the seller wants a quick sale or is in a big chain so unless you’ve been in the property and spoken to the agent it’s hard to narrow it down. Obviously there’s a rough ceiling price you can work to but what something is advertised for and what it sells for can be really different and if you wait for the sold price to come onto zoopla the price market have changed - certainly at the moment.
Just get a few agents round to value. It’s no obligation and even if you do put your house on the market you always want a few agents to value so they’re more than used to valuing without it becoming a listing.

Oh agreed, I would only go off of price sold but it’s nice context to see the insides. If a load of sold properties are going to have updated sales prices but no corresponding images then it just makes it a tiny bit harder to understand what went on over 2020/21 tbh. It’s complicated even more so by the fact prices are grossly inflated right now, I think for the next 2/3 years it’ll be challenging to determine a reasonable price for a property and I wouldn’t want to go too high and have it sat there for weeks/months. Who bleeping knows tbh.

 

[Anne1448]

Yes, having the pictures of a sold property makes a huge difference. Sometimes you can see entire neighbourhood sold at a reasonable price. But you have to add 50-100k extra.

 

[heretoreaditall2019]

The local agents might also know through the grapevine how much the neighbours place went for @heretoreaditall2019 ? In my experience agents are real gossips - may as well take advantage of that

Oh it’ll be on zoopla regardless as they take land registry data, it’s just more frustrating if any nice house that sold in 2020/21 never got listed online it’ll be very hard to understand prices? Like these are obviously not house prices as that’s tacky lol but say the most commonly available probate style properties go for a tenner but decent ones go for twenty to fifty there’s no way of telling where your property sits in that range because you don’t know which ones had extensions, garden size (which varies a lot even down the same street here), really nicely done (versus the 90s or cheaply fitted out ones), etc etc as the images just aren’t there?

It’s such a pathetic thing to complain about in the grand scheme of how bad the housing market/stock is but yet another thing that shows the insanity of this stamp duty holiday and properties flying off the shelf. Will be interested to see how the market is in 2022…

 

[AllSeeingEye123]

Couple, 26 and 32, build their own TINY home in lockdown for £30,000

The tiny house on a farm in Worcester - which has been affectionately named Tiny Blue - belongs to gin distillery manager Grace Stringer, 26, and her DJ partner Craig Jukes, 32.

www.dailymail.co.uk

Good on them. They have worked hard to create something for themselves and avoid paying out too much rent to some robber known as a landlord.

 

[justbeingnosy98]

Is anyone else in the process of / thinking of buying just now? I’m really worried I’ll pay a hugely inflated price and then the market will crash

 

[littlepup]

Is anyone else in the process of / thinking of buying just now? I’m really worried I’ll pay a hugely inflated price and then the market will crash

We're holding off. It's a gamble but the 25% increase on asking in one year that we're seeing in our area cannot be sustainable. Sales are falling through and coming back to market 2-3 months later £20k more.
People will surely be in negative equity after this.
It's fine if you are keeping the house for 5+ years to wait for it to come back of course. For us it would be a stepping stone home though.

 

[Bitofthebubbly]

I think unless you really have to move, buying right now probably isn’t the best time. But I’m someone who purely window shops and watches the market from afar so that’s easy for me to say!

Same with buying a used car, although the reason for that is different, it’s crazy out there right now! Something has to give at some point.

 

[Anne1448]

I'm in the same position. My goal is to buy next year. Hopefully prices will go down. It is actually coming back to reality in my area so I am really happy.

 

[Boutros-Boutros Ghali]

Thing is if people end up in negative equity they won’t move unless they have to do that’ll mean less available housing on the market so more people staying in rented and those prices rising….it’s a mad situation right now

And used cars are absolute madness….we got offered £14k for ours a few months back. It’s now over £20k so we can potentially make £6k on what’s owed on the finance….no cars to swap it for unfortunately, can’t even test drive the one we want as they've sold all the stock of the particular model in the Uk and nothing coming in until March next year

 

[Kim Mild]

Thing is if people end up in negative equity they won’t move unless they have to do that’ll mean less available housing on the market so more people staying in rented and those prices rising….it’s a mad situation right now

And used cars are absolute madness….we got offered £14k for ours a few months back. It’s now over £20k so we can potentially make £6k on what’s owed on the finance….no cars to swap it for unfortunately, can’t even test drive the one we want as they've sold all the stock of the particular model in the Uk and nothing coming in until March next year

Used cars are crazy prices. I used to buy cars about 8 years old for about 2 grand . Now it's about 5 grand for a 8 - 10 year old car. I changed cars recently and they gave me near 2k in part ex. When I got that car a couple of years ago they were reluctant to take my previous car in part ex cos it was only worth scrap value.

There have been fewer new cars registered in the UK per year since the credit crunch, but still it's crazy. And people pay it cos they need to change cars as their situations change.

 

[heretoreaditall2019]

Is anyone else in the process of / thinking of buying just now? I’m really worried I’ll pay a hugely inflated price and then the market will crash

We're holding off. It's a gamble but the 25% increase on asking in one year that we're seeing in our area cannot be sustainable. Sales are falling through and coming back to market 2-3 months later £20k more.
People will surely be in negative equity after this.
It's fine if you are keeping the house for 5+ years to wait for it to come back of course. For us it would be a stepping stone home though.

Agree completely. Even worse is seeing people pay over the odds for dives so they’re taking out huge loans on top of the mortgage I know it’s only negative equity when you realise it eg go to sell but wonder what happens when it comes to remortgage time…? We’ve not remortgaged yet so I don’t know the process but I’d imagined we’d get another independent valuation done which would inform our LTV calculation therefore products available, with the idea the lower the LTV the better the products. What are people going to do when they’re in a WORSE LTV? Will there be FTBs who find themselves being told it’s gone down and they’ve gone from starting at a 90% LTV to now being in a 95% or 105%?! And what happens re affordability checks for people that maxed out the mortgage and then got loans out on top when they’ve only got a tiny % of equity in the property?