I'm looking at buying a house in the South West London area. One that I like is £115000 over the highest price paid on the same road according to houseprices.co.uk. (last house sold in July 2006).
They have done the place up to high specs. What are your opinions please?
If the place is nearly perfect would you worry about the high price if it is still within your top budget?
I can't tell what the house previously sold for as it isn't listed on the search on HP.
house prices in SW london have deffo shot up, i can speak for that as i live there, but £115,000 over the ceiling price sounds pretty hefty to me. how big is this place compared to the other properties?
Well there is SW and SW (and I speak as one who has just sold in by far the cheapest SW post code ).
It is well known that there is a premium for the bigger houses in the more sought after areas. So the answer my be justified *if* your house is bigger than the ones you are comparing it to.
Its a 3 bed / 2 bathroom semi - the next door house is an 'mirror' and is only 2 bedrooms, but this one been extended into the loft for a 3rd.
It's also very hard to guage the number of bedrooms of the different houses on the road as there are lots of different styles of house on the road (not just long terraces).
There are probably 30 houses on this road all in all, and only 9 are listed on houseprices. 8 range from 180K to 325K, and then the highest one is 380K which sold in July 2006. The one I'm looking at is 495K.
It has been done up very nicely (huge loft room with shower room and storage / dressing area, and extended kitchen etc etc, and there wouldn't be anything to do. I think they must have owned the house for a long time as it isn't listed on houseprices.
I have a top budget of 500k (buying with a relative, but only me and kiddos will live there), so it is affordable, but I don't want to buy something which if we need to move for any reason will not sell for what we pay.
Originally posted by tincat: There are probably 30 houses on this road all in all, and only 9 are listed on houseprices. 8 range from 180K to 325K, and then the highest one is 380K which sold in July 2006. The one I'm looking at is 495K.
I think you're off your trolley, along with the sellers.
I would think so too (although I might be more polite about it , but then around the corner and within about 400m vicinity, there are 6 houses which are well over 500K. One is going for 825K, (3bed), one for 649(4bed) and another is 645(3bed) etc etc
However, I've just checked on houseprices for the nearby roads that I've mentioned (didn't think to do that before), and it's really telling that there is between 150 - 200K difference in the current asking prices, and what prices were actually achieved a few months ago
I wonder if in my area people are just completely loading prices. I've been looking for a couple of months, and there's not a lot of turnover in property here it seems. Some things that are selling were also selling last year when I was casually looking.
Last year when I thought of buying, my top budget was 330K. when I couldn't find the right house within that range I went into rented. Now my top budget is 500, and I'm having the same sort of problem!!!
prices have whacked up considerably in this area since last year, i live on the twickenham border and reckon houses same size or smaller that are not done up as well as mine are now selling for £30k more than i paid for mine last spring. and that's ex council houses, so i imagine in twickenham itself, in private houses, the mark up is even greater.
i suppose it's about what someone is prepared to pay. i get the feeling you're not comfortable with the price, that it is not in line with prices round about. if i were uncomfortable like that i wouldn't go ahead.
when i bought my place, yes, i huffed and puffed about the price, but felt comfortable that the price was in line with what i could expect for the house, area and prices at the time. it didn't feel unnecessarily inflated. some house have a huge mark up due to the decor/finish etc, but i think these will be the first houses to swiftly lose value if the market declines.
Houses in my part of west London (not Twickenham) have increased significantly over the past year or so (had been static for previous 3 or 4 years). 3 bed houses identical to those which sold for £475K 20 months ago are now on for £570K.
A friend in another part of west London (Barnes) just won a bidding war on a high-priced property before the details were even printed, with the EA asking the vendor not to remove the house from the market as 'we could get more'. There was an article on the front page of the Guardian on Saturday about the property market in London, in a similar vein.
I don't really know anything about the south and house prices there but I'm with Snooze Control, who totally hit it on the head.
It smacks of somebody playing silly b*ggers just to see if someone will pay it. It's 115k. One hundred and fifteen thousand pounds. For G sake you people down south must have more money than sense! For an extra bedroom. Just get bunk beds instead!
Says me sat in here in me little semi, worth only a bit more than the *difference* in price we're discussing
In my eyes it makes no difference whether prices have risen sharply in the last couple of years if you do have comparison selling prices of other houses in the vicinity from within the last year.
If we were talking up to about £30k then I might consider it, but this is astronomical. I suspect that if/when it came to your surveyor valuation, this might drop down considerably. I don't know how much cash you are purchasing with, but lenders will not just lend what you want to borrow on the basis of you being able to afford the repayments.
I say take it a bit further. Try to find the property on ourproperty.co.uk if you haven't seen it on other sites, you never know if it's listed in one place and not the others.
*It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them. -- Pierre De Beaumarchais
I've just exchanged on a sale in SW18 for more than £125k over what any 3 bed has previously sold for in this street and more than £30k over any 4 bed (mine is 3 bed) - well according to Rightmove anyway.
You could say the buyers were 'off their trolleys' but if they were they weren't alone, we had 4 offers at between 98% and 104% of asking price with one day of viewing.
It smacks of somebody playing silly b*ggers just to see if someone will pay it. It's 115k. One hundred and fifteen thousand pounds. For G sake you people down south must have more money than sense! For an extra bedroom. Just get bunk beds instead!
Says me sat in here in me little semi, worth only a bit more than the *difference* in price we're discussing
But assuming that as a buyer you are also a seller (which people in this price bracket generally are, unless they just won the lottery), the prices are irrelevant, it is all just theoretical money, you never see any of it. My friends in the Barnes story sold their house for a huge increase over what they paid for it years back, but the house they bought in the bidding war had also seen a similar huge rise. So both houses may as well have been worth £50.
There are pitfalls in allowing house price information sites to totally determine your thinking. From what you say tincat, property turnover in that particular road is fairly low and there are many different styles of houses. It may be that a house matching the brief of the one you have viewed has not come up for sale for several years thus there is no direct price comparison to be found. You also have to guard against making assumptions as to what the price data means. Anyone looking at the data on the house I recently sold would think that I had made a 40% return over only two years based on the purchase price and the sale price – but I didn’t because the house when I bought it required extensive renovation and I had to plough a lot of money into this. If you know the local area well and have viewed a number of properties you will know instinctively if the asking price reflects the local market or not.
I might just give it a whirl myself and see if I can rob someone for paying over double what my house is worth.
I mean, I paid £78k for mine a year ago, but I've converted the loft into an extra bedroom so therefore on that basis I should get £250k for it without any trouble, even though the ceiling round here is about £120-130k.
Originally posted by susiecam: There are pitfalls in allowing house price information sites to totally determine your thinking. From what you say tincat, property turnover in that particular road is fairly low and there are many different styles of houses. It may be that a house matching the brief of the one you have viewed has not come up for sale for several years thus there is no direct price comparison to be found. You also have to guard against making assumptions as to what the price data means. Anyone looking at the data on the house I recently sold would think that I had made a 40% return over only two years based on the purchase price and the sale price – but I didn’t because the house when I bought it required extensive renovation and I had to plough a lot of money into this. If you know the local area well and have viewed a number of properties you will know instinctively if the asking price reflects the local market or not.
What she said. Comparing with other properties currently on the market is a better way of judging if a property is fairly priced.
I do have a very narrow search area though as my kids are very settled in a school in this area. I'm seeing a couple of other properties this week, but if nothing improves upon this house then I'm putting in a much lower offer. (+/-50 - 60k less than asking). If you don't ask, you don't get so worth a shot.
Originally posted by susiecam: There are pitfalls in allowing house price information sites to totally determine your thinking. From what you say tincat, property turnover in that particular road is fairly low and there are many different styles of houses. It may be that a house matching the brief of the one you have viewed has not come up for sale for several years thus there is no direct price comparison to be found. You also have to guard against making assumptions as to what the price data means. Anyone looking at the data on the house I recently sold would think that I had made a 40% return over only two years based on the purchase price and the sale price – but I didn’t because the house when I bought it required extensive renovation and I had to plough a lot of money into this. If you know the local area well and have viewed a number of properties you will know instinctively if the asking price reflects the local market or not.
What she said. Comparing with other properties currently on the market is a better way of judging if a property is fairly priced for the area. Whether you want to pay it is another thing.
I'm struck by the difference in psychology between northerners and southerners on house prices; in the south they've gone up so much and over such a long period people are happy to pay what seem huge prices, as they believe in a few years the price will seem smaller, and they've so far been right. Many people say thinks like "Everyone I know, every day they go to work, wishes they'd bought a housee they travel past."
I moved north and remember chatting to people outside an EA's window; one chap was a decorator and said (something like) "it's mad to pay £50,000, I never would" but then remembered a builder friend who'd paid, done up, and sold for £80K or something. Some people seem to think modern money is actually worth something fixed, which, I take it, it isn't - inflation has existed since the gold standard was abolished and there's no sign of it ever stopping.
There are other differences, notably the lack of respect for older buildings in tne north as is seen in these demolition and crap newbuild schemes (there are some exceptions - a company called 'Urban Splash' seems good, for example).
The truth is there is no objective price for houses; so back your own judgement after taking other peoples' views on board.
Originally posted by argent: There are other differences, notably the lack of respect for older buildings in tne north as is seen in these demolition and crap newbuild schemes
Probably because a lot us had to live in them and did not enjoy the experience .
Most of the people that romanticise the old style northern back to back, two up and two down and the like never had to live in one.
Decades on, I can see that ours was really just one step above slum housing.
).
, but then around the corner and within about 400m vicinity, there are 6 houses which are well over 500K. One is going for 825K, (3bed), one for 649(4bed) and another is 645(3bed) etc etc
Comparing with other properties currently on the market is a better way of judging if a property is fairly priced.
