To ask about experiences of selling property in London now?

[gardenangels]

Conflicting reports from estate agents. ..

We'll have to disagree about that.

Flowers - you have a skewed view of how the property market works I feel.

It's not trolling to ask you to think about someone else. Why are people who might need more than a 1 bed flat so they can have kids less worthy than you are? If prices plummet, people will be trapped and sometimes fucked. That's not hypothetical. People in that sort of situation are just as real as you.

But hey, who cares, so long as you can profit from their misery, eh??

And yes, absolutely the market is the canary in the coal mine. You'd have to be hopelessly naive to think prices could drop and nothing else!

Temporary you really do not get it. You talk about owners being stuck, unable to meet their family needs or move forward with their lives.....what exactly do you think is happening to renters? Also, I never said anything about rubbing hands gleefully, just pointed out that hoping for the situation to become fairer is not mean. You seem to think that owners wishing for a situation of luck for them that has lifelong consequences for those who have not yet bought is ok, but those working hard, paying astromical rent to cover someone else's mortgage....well, if they wish for any change they are just mean! I appreciate you probably don't see it quite like that, I suspect we all have quite balanced views but it is easy to misunderstand online.

I wish it could be fairer for everyone, there are countries where prices down rise and fall so drastically I think, that seems better but it isn't something out governments have ever tried to mimic.

Re property being the Canary in the coal mine, that can be so....but for many renters a downturn would have to affect them very badly for it to outweigh the benefits of a house price fall....that is how bad things are.

Should be don't not down, sorry!

Oh I get that. My point is devil's advocate - there is no way to please everyone. Some people will suffer whatever happens. So to gloat and hope for a "nice big crash" I found v distasteful!

My dh is trying to sell deceased fil's home in SE London ( within the m25) and it has been on the marcket for a few months with very little interest. I suspect it is very overpriced and there are 3 siblings who cannot agree on dropping the price so it's a bit of a stalemate.

Prices in London and much of the SE do certainly need to come down, or at least to flatline for a long time.

Back in 2011 I was looking with a dd at flats in Tooting - hardly the height of fashion or trendiness. 2 bed period maisonettes that were then priced at £250k-£275k according to how done up they were, are now routinely priced at £500k+.
By any standards this is crazy and unsustainable.

Personally I have loathed the gloating and hand-rubbing in recent years over ever-escalating prices, and particularly from those property journalists who write of prices 'improving'. Hardly 'improving' for all those who are completely priced out.
It's high time that ever-in teasing house prices were no,longer seen as a good thing.
Quite apart from anything else, higher prices mean higher rents for all those who have no choice, and I gather the annual housing benefit bill is something like £23bn. It's quite mad.

'Ever-increasing' - why is there no edit facility?? It's bloody irritating.

Babyroobs, you might tell them about relatives of mine who were trying to sell a probate house for well over a year. They were not familiar with the area since they lived a long way away, and believed the agent's evidently wildly optimistic valuation. Offers were turned down, and eventually the price was reduced quite a bit in dribs and drabs.

It eventually sold to someone who'd offered quite a bit more 6 months previously - and been turned down.

They need to build much better transport links so people can live further out, and they need to invest in some seriously affordable housing - not the box ticking exercise that sees a few flats tucked onto a new luxury development. And unfortunately high levels of immigration don't help on that level (I am pro immigration, so NOT blaming anyone who moves here individually!).

People being smug about prices doubling are wrong. People hoping for a crash so they can pick up someone else's repossessed home for a bargain are wrong. It's all wrong!

They need to build much better transport links so people can live further out

No they dont. Then you have to afford several thousand for the bloody train fares.

The prices need to come down. £500K for a flat in Tooting is a disgrace.

Also property prices in some areas have gone up by 100% in the last 2 years or so.

If there was a house price crash about about 30%, i could afford to buy something.

Given that the value of homes has gone up so astronomically in such a short space of time, it wont leave most home owners in negative equity.

For example, value has increased by 100% and then drops 30%. That still leaves existing owners with a HUGE profit and a drop in prices leaves existing owners more able to afford a new home to suit their needs if they want to move.

Slow market post Brexit and pre-US election. Things should pick up in the New Year - if they don't, that's when we will know that the property market is really cooling

If you owned a place, would you be hoping for a 30% drop in its value so other people could buy somewhere? Would you sell your place at 2/3 of its market value so that someone else could get on the ladder? What if you had bought in the last 2 years so you had paid top whack, would you want to take a hit? It's bollocks to say that only a few people have bought and sold in 2 years, otherwise how would the prices have risen? And why does that make it ok anyway - is it ok to hope that they lose out, maybe lose their homes and end up with a massive mortgage still around their necks as happened to lots of people in the last crash, because it will help you? Are you really comfortable with wishing that on people just because they bought their homes? Some people had banks coming after them years after the trauma of being evicted!

The housing crisis is a very difficult issue and someone is going to lose out badly when prices rise or fall. I don't think it's fair to think that some people should be happy to see their homes drop in value because others can't buy yet.

That's why I think efforts and hopes should be focused on much more affordable transport and housing.

SDLT has a lot to do with it. If the government drops that it might get things moving, but historically governments are not so keen on reducing tax.

Where I live (just outside London) prices have softened a bit, but I still know someone who sold their house in two weeks.

Of course the other thing that would help is putting real efforts into expanding other cities so that we aren't so ridiculously londoncentric. If you got the same wages, imagine what one could buy in the villages/cities in other parts of the country. Businesses should be incentivised to move to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds as well, IMO.

I know lots of people who have bought in the last 2 years and if there's a big crash people here are gleefully hoping for, those people who aren't BTLers but FTB who are in their late 30s and have worked hard for fucking years to try and get on the ladder, will go straight into negative equity.

That won't free up any housing. If we go into negative equity, there's not a chance we'll be moving so that's one less FTB property available.

Incidentally in my corner of SE London, 1-2 bed flats haven't come down in price at all.

much more affordable travel

Well that's never going to happen!
Don't you see the price increases in London fares every January/new year time?

I don't necessarily think that's the solution.

Moving outside of the M25 to get "more for your money" is all very well.
But then you have a huge amount to pay for train fares, it's not an I significant amount.

And often, that train line is late, delays getting home, never getting a seat.
Believe me, I've got friends in that situation.

No, for me, prices need to come down a bit in London, please.

Turquoise - let's see how happy you are about someone saying that to you when it is you at risk of losing your home or going into negative equity.

Incidentally in my corner of SE London, 1-2 bed flats haven't come down in price at all.

That's interesting Kirin. IIRC from threads I think you are not far from me (Zone 2, sounds like a green veggie) and lower end stuff is dropping a bit here, though there are greater reductions the higher the price / the larger the property.

Maybe your end is trendier / still seems like good value?

I'm SE London Zone 2 and it's not quite hot cakes like last year but everything is holding its value and has sold within a week of being on the market or before the for sale board has gone up. We live in a desirable enclave of SE London with good schools around.

EssentialHummus I'm not far from you, less than half a mile I would have thought. No real reductions here - one place reduced their price but it was grossly overpriced in the first place.

I'm constantly told it's trendy but I have yet to work out why that would be. I'm perhaps too old to see the trendy bit.

I've not seen anything on the market for anywhere close to what we paid. From what I've seen the reductions showing on rightmove but flats the sane size as ours were being put on for £30-50k more than we paid in August. I've not looked at ex-LA though so am comparing it to period properties which is what we bought.

I am still constantly looking on rightmove in the hope that one day we can move back to where we actually wanted to buy but there, barely anything is coming on the market let alone coming down in price.