Buying a repossessed propertyhouse

[bothered]

has anyone got any experience of buying a repossessed property, where do you find them?

We didn't buy one, but when we bought our first house, a few of the ones we viewed were being repossessed.

In our experience, they are just advertised as normal via estate agents. The mortgage company/bank is out to get the best price it can.

We had a very uncomfortable viewing once, where the husband showed us round and basically told us their life story and how they were having to sell up because of repossession.

auctions ?

we bought our maisonette as a repossession, it was advertised in the estate agents. Managed to get it (2 bedrooms) for £35,500 9 years ago, its now worth £120,000 at least.

Our house was a repossession when we bought it in 1995. It was sold through an ordinary estate agent, but one dealing with the lower end of the market iyswim.

It's not really any different from buying a house directly from the vendors, apart from making for slightly more complicated paperwork. The vendors were a firm of surveyors in the City of London dealing (I presume) on behalf of the Trustee in Bankruptcy. There were some hitches with legal aspects of the sale due (iirc) to the fact that the house had been empty for a year, the previously bankrupt owner had skipped the country and therefore they couldn't guarantee vacant possession. In the end we went ahead and it's been fine.

The natural home of repossessions is auctions, but that is an extra layer of complication. I wouldn't be queueing up to buy a house at auction unless I was v. confident I knew what I was doing.

Apparently the regulations governing HMOs have changed recently (HMO= Houses in multiple occupation houses let out as individual rooms). It's become much more unfavourable for landlords due to tighter restrictions, so there seem to be quite a few of these coming onto the market. But don't assume that a house needing complete gutting will be a better deal than a normal one on my calculations the difference between the asking price on these and a renovated one would barely cover the cost of the work, never mind the hassle and the cost of renting somewhere else. I suspect people have been watching too much Sarah Beeny and assume they can make a fortune out of buying a wreck. It ain't necessarily so, unless you get lucky.

In my experience as an estate -agent, albeit 7 years ago, we were not allowed to tell anybody it was a re-posession. This was to ensure we got the best possible price for the person we were selling it for. However, when we had an acceptable offer on it we had to advertise it in the local paper, saying if anybody was prepared to pay x amount or above to contact us, so definitely scour the local papers for these.

Like frogs says - be very wary of buying at auction. Make sure you do the legal work first. We once had a repo where the owners had built a kitchen onto their neighbours land - so they could have been forced to remove it!!! In our area properties are only sent to auction where they have failed to sell on the open market first. Ask yourself why. Best of luck .

My dad has bought these at auction.

The only caveat is that you generally need to be a cash buyer if you're purchasing at auction, or have a business loan.