Is anyone else having a misreable time trying to sell their house?

[Roseflower]

Our house has been on the market since June and trying to sell it - it's so depressing. Our one offer fell through and since then it just been no more offers.

Buyers (this month we have only had FTB) seem to be getting more and more unrealistic in what they expect for their money around here.

I hate everything about selling a house- the horrible estate agents, the constant calls from rival estate agents touting, the time waster people, rushing around like mad tidying up after dd for hours, giving up our plans to get ready for viewings, people saying nasty things about our family home... but worse in the uncertainity of it all.

Be good to know other people feel as down as me for some support. Or even better people who did feel like me but now things have turned out well!

I do sympathise Roseflower. But as an FTB who would kill for a 3 bedroom house near good schools 20 minutes from Waterloo, I can assure you that we would snap up your house if we could afford it and I'm sure there are lots of others in our position. But prices have risen so far beyond salaries it is becoming impossible for most FTBs to get even close to what you would probably view as a realistic figure. Something has to give but God knows what it's going to be.

She's not actually in London though - she's in a town on the Surrey border, and if it's where I think it quite a few houses there are marketed at first time buyers.

It's a bit different once you're actually in London - certainly in our zone 3 suburb there is no way we could contemplate a three bedroom house, even if we had already bought a flat. There is roughly £150k difference between the 2 bed maisonettes on our side of the street and the 3 bed terraces on the other side.

sigh. new agent is taking photos later on this am. any last minute tips????

pleeeeassse??

We were trying to sell our house, initially we had rented it out and asked the tenants to move our so we could sell it. They did and we were assured that the house was in a salable condition. The house languished for five months with two viewings in all that time. In the end we sacked the estate agent and put it on to rent again. No one was interested, despite it being in a reasonable area. When we went to see it, the reason for the lack of viewings was obvious. It was filthy, the garden which we had been paying to have cut was like a jungle and it needed painting. Cue four days of furious work by me and DH while DD looked bored to tears. It has just recently been rented out again and we will be trying to sell it again in Spring.

Sungirltan - make sure you view the room from a likely photo angle. Meaning, stand in the doorway of your bedroom and make sure you can't see all the crap stuff under the bed. Unfortunately, you can see some boxes under our bed in the photo. Annoying, as the rest of the room is clutter free and looks great.

We cleared all rooms of clutter, cleaned windows, drew curtains, turn on a lamp, put some small, tasteful flower arrangements in appropriate places. The garden will probably sell our house, so DH primped and pruned it within an inch and it looks fab in photos.

Our house does look a bit bare (probably since we are used to more clutter!), but I think it allows people to see exactly what they are getting.

Just wondering whether you would go to the trouble of putting new double glazed windows in before trying to sell? The windows at the back of the house are fairly new but the windows at the front, although double glazed, are past their best. We did obtain quotes before deciding to sell. It would cost us about £10-12k. The thing is - would the windows I want be the ones a purchaser would want? Would it be better just to knock something off the price if this were mentioned?

Also sungirltan - do you get light in the rooms at different times of day? I got the agent to come in the afternoon when the bedroom is filled with sunlight but the rest of the time it's very gloomy. No clutter anywhere - shove things in drawers or wherever you can so that the surfaces are all clear

artyjools how many windows is that for that price? I replaced a 5 window bay and a 3 window bay for £1800 a few years ago with an independent window fitter who works for our builder.

We did sell our house quickly but in 2005 with dated aluminium windows because the rest of the property was good. The new people put new ones in straight away.

If you are thinking of replacing them ask one of your best local builders who they use to do their windows. Most of the independent ones charge so much less than the big rip off companies.

Kerb appeal is very important!

I think that everything is overpriced and the way the deadlock is going to be broken is for houses at the top to come down. First time buyers are struggling to get on the ladder, but if you are further up the ladder the gap between a three bed semi and a three bed detached, and then a four bed detached etc becomes even greater. In the areas we are looking at (leafy Surrey, good schools), good sized 4/5 bed houses are staggeringly expensive. One agent told me that people get a kick out of thinking their house is worth £1 million. The trouble is they aren't worth that, they really aren't, and buyers know it. I have seen houses come down by up to £200k, but they still aren't selling. Many are more than 10% overpriced IMO. (BTW, we aren't looking at anything that expensive - chance would be a fine thing LOL)

Personally, I think our house has been overvalued, and equity in a house is worth diddly sqat unless you are downsizing, have inherited a house or it is an investment property. Very few people actually benefit from rising house prices. We all should know now that taking equity out of your house to finance an exotic holiday etc is not a great idea.

Anyway, I am not paying huge sums of money to move into a house that isn't as good as the one we are in, so we need to get a certain amount of money for ours to enable us to move - we don't HAVE to move. So the movement has to start at the top, not the bottom. Then the wave of savings moves down the line. The trouble is, some of the people in the more expensive houses are living in Lala land. If your house has been on the market for 6 months and there is little interest, unless there is a major problem with the house or area, it MUST be overpriced - IMO!!

Thank you 2old4thislark. We have quite a lot of windows - 2 x 5 window bay, 2 x 3 window bay, another large window plus a door with 2 side panels. I think we may be able to get it a little cheaper, but perhaps not much cheaper. It does have kerb appeal - IMO - so perhaps I am worrying too much about it. Its only been on the market for 2 weeks and the first week it wasn't advertised locally at all, not even a board up, just on the internet. I had forgotten how much I truly hate this moving house business!!

Our situation is similar to yours Artyjools.
We have a nice smallish 4-bedroom house which we own outright and have a chunk of savings and could get a mortgage, so on the face of it we could go for a house worth double our current one, and yet for that money we can't find what we want, which is simply a slightly bigger garden and an extra recep and maybe a pantry or utility room. The step up from where we are now seems massive. Meanwhile the area around us is full of houses a bit bigger than ours and priced at more than double our valuation, which have been on the market for over a year. We would quite like to move but not at that price!

we are in t'north though.

That's a lot of windows! My window man is Chertsey based which may be not far from you.

We did move into a smaller property and extended to get a better area. We sold a 3 bed 60's terrace and bought a 2 bed bungalow which was £50k more then spent £75k doing it up. We now have a 4 bed 2 bath bungalow which we could never have afforded unless we lived with the pain of the building wotk. Though we had a brill builder so it was worth it. We tripled our mortgaged which was a bit scary, though we only owe similar amounts to those FTB's buying a flat around here.

I was checking out Righmove last night and one of the local estate agents seems to be on cloud cuckoo land - all it's properties IMO are overpriced - £450-500k for 3-4 bed properties that aren't brilliant.

Prices really need to fall further but I don't think they will.

artyjools don't panic yet - it's early days!

Hi Roseflower, we had this on our last move. It took us a year (with a couple of months off in the middle) to move.

If you've seriously checked out the competition on Rightmove and you think yours is priced right then have you changed estate agents? Our 1st ones were crap - their main business was selling big houses and they sold ours very negatively - ie telling people how they could improve the house if they moved in. Second lot were much better - worked harder at selling it/getting people round.

Also - never change your plans to accomodate a viewers - they will be the timewasters or worse (as I had once after missing one of the DC's assemblies) people who don't even turn up!

I think you just have to hang in there and try not to take the feedback comments personally.

My house has been on the market since January - we haven't had a single viewing :(
We have changed estate agents, to no effect, and dropped the price. The price IS realistic as the are other similar houses being offered at the same price. However it seems in this area this is a glut of houses to sell, and very few buyers who can afford a mortgage. I live in Teesside where we have suffered a tremendous blow when Corus shut down, laying off nearly 2,000 people.

It is frustrating because the area we live is lovely - near a newly regenerated town centre, excellent transport links and good schools. And the council is very good too.

Only reason why are moving is because DH is working in Sheffield now and it is a 90min commute each way, so we want to live closer to where he works. Plus his DS lives near Sheffield and we'd be close to friends and family too. Otherwise I would be happy to stay here. I really love my house and so far I think it is just as well we haven't sold it we haven't seen a house I like in Sheffield as much as the one I live in!

If you can't sell then you can't really say that buyers are unrealistic in what they expect for the price. A house, like anythignelse, is only worth what someone wil pay for it - it does not have (much) intrinsic worth. How do you know buyers are being unrealistic - sounds like the sellers are to me.

We are also stuck in this depressing situation. Our house has been on the market since March. The first lot of agents were really bad, sending round really wrong people for the kind of house, and hardly any of them at that.

We ditched them in June and put it back on the market with a great agent in August. Since then we have had up to 5 viewings a week! The house is a large 4 bed detached with large garden and small heated swimming pool. The whole house costs us an absolute bloody fortune to run so we want to move areas completely and downsize to a 3 bed Victorian terrace with little garden.

The problem is that although loads of people seem to love the house, no one is in a position to make an offer because they haven't sold theirs yet either. We have 2 very interested people whom the agent keeps in touch with, but until they sell their houses we are at stalemate.

We have come down in price by £20 since March and are thinking about another £10 right now. Luckily as we are downsizing its not quite as crucial to get every penny, but even so we feel very miffed at having to drop the price all the time. (At least everyones doing it though!)

we've managed to get a private buyer for our house, but had to take nearly 10% under what all the local agents have valued it at... we bought at the height of the market in 2007 and have spent fortunes on it as we had intended it to be our 'forever' family house. it really hurts to think of the money we've lost on it.

now want to move out of london, have found a house we love but its wildly overpriced and even at our full stretch offer of 95% of asking price, vendors have rejected outright... totally bizarre as the house has been on the market for 3 months and we're the only people who've offered!

'We have come down in price by £20 since March and are thinking about another £10 right now. '

not much of a price drop BigusBumus

Yes but I don't live in London so its much cheaper round here in the first place. Therefore £30k is quite a lot to us.

I was laughing at your typo - you missed off the 'k' and said you had reduced by 10 quid....

20 quid I mean!

Oh! I see what you mean - doh!