WWYD - found lovely house, but... (long, sorry)

[FingonTheValiant]

DH and I are planning to move back to France in 18months-2years, and the market for buyers is great there at the moment, so we've been looking this summer.

We found a really lovely house, we both love it, and it's in the right location, however the asking price is too much for us. But, it?s been on the market for 6 months, no offers, and they?ve already dropped the price from 265,000 to 238,500. On top of that, the agent (who doesn?t earn anything unless it sells) told us that the actual value of the house is only 200,000, which is the very top of our budget. Plus it needs some serious work done to it.

All this in mind, we made an offer of 180,000 knowing it'd be refused (and it was) but to try to bring them nearer towards the 200,000.

The agent then got back to us and said that the problem is that it's an inheritance, and the money has to be split between 6 children, which is why they're so desperate to sell for as much as possible. He also found out that the solicitor they instructed can only accept 210,000 without consulting everyone of them individually, and they each have the power to veto.

Anyway, the question is, would you go through the hassle of trying to negotiate a lower price, given that it only takes one of them each time to stop it dead? And given all the work and time it's going to take to bring it up to spec would you try to find the extra 10,000 just because it seems like a perfect house? Or is it easier to just walk away now and find somewhere else? (Problem being that we're now back in the UK, so it's internet searching only for a while).

Thanks for any input.

Re the work :
It needs about 50,000 euros worth, none of which is cosmetic (like stripping the floral wallpaper off of the ceilings ) or things like new bathrooms and kitchen, which it also needs. It's things like:
a new roof
putting in insulation under roof (there's none at all)
the wattle and daub back wall has gone moldy and needs completely redoing
new windows (there are gaps in all of them between window and frame and the wind comes howling through)
the cement has dropped out of the brickwork and the whole lot needs repointing
one of the bedrooms has serious damp etc etc.

We could just about stretch to it on top, on the basis that we have 2 years to do it in, so can save and do a little at a time. And the roof might just survive 4 years. And we might win the lottery And my dad can do some of it for us.

I'd offer 200,000 and walk away if they dont accept. They may well come back to you in a few months and accept, but you would be crazy to pay over the odds for a house with all that wrong with it. I can virtually guarantee that once you get to work on it more problems will show themselves. We bought our house in Feb, tiny three bed terrace, builder estimated £10,000 including new bathroom, boiler complete redecorate. We did most of it ourselves and its completely exhausting, demoralising, still isnt finished adn has cost almost double already, because as soon as we started work we discovered more hidden problems e.g the damp was more complicated than it looked and it was a tiny patch on the kitchen wall. If you could cover that 50,000 really easy from savings with a buffer for emergencies it would be a different matter.

All the work has meant that we are all really tired and sore all the time, plus Dh isnt around as much as we would like, which ahs been really ahrd on our relationship, and we lived round the corner for the first six weeks.

Something else will come up, it always does.

I think I would do the same. Offer 200,000 and then walk away. It is so close to what they are all prepared to accept that you may find that are happy with that. Especially as it has been on the market for 6 months.

If the agent is any good he should be making it clear to them that 200,000 is a good offer bearing in mind the amount of work that needs doing to it. After all 10k split between 6 is not a huge amount in comparison to them waiting another 6-12 months for another offer. Bearing in mind the state of the property could get worse over the winter if they have bad weather and no one is doing any work to it.

You still have plenty of time to find a property out there and I can't see the market picking up that much there.

This happens a lot in France doesn't it with the inheritance laws there so I think offer the 200k and then walk away. Their solicitor should be used to dealing with this sort of situation (although 6 children is possibly a bit unusual!)

There is a flat 3 doors down from me which is on the market for £140k more than I sold mine for. It's a little bit bigger but not much and needs loads doing to it. The reason it's so expensive is that the old lady who lived there had a stroke and has gone into a home :( and her children are trying to get enough money to pay for that and so they still get some cash. It's ridiculous.

No, the 50,000 wont be easy to cover :( it'll mean nothing but building purchases from now until it's done, and goodness knows how long that will be, and christmas presents in the form of "this year darling I got you two upstairs windows". And emergencies will be emergencies in financial terms as well.

Plus they've lied to us several times. One of the sons claimed that they'd had quotes done for the new roof, and it was only 13,000, not the 25,000 we had quoted, so we were being cheeky knocking off money. He then sent us the quotes to prove it; and because you cant tell much just from a supply list we phoned the roofers in question, who told us that the quote was just for the back of the roof, not the whole thing like they were claiming - and the whole thing needs doing. They also said the house was inhabitable in it's current condition, but when pushed admitted that they'd never stayed in it outside of June, July and August (it's a family holiday home). So they have no idea what the lack of insulation and poorly fitting windows would be like in January.

Oh, and it has no central heating, just an open fire and a few storage heaters, so that'd have to go on the price list too.

Also, they claimed that the house behind (under construction) would be finished soon, and that the guy was there at weekends building it. We phoned the village Mairie, and they told us that the site had been abandoned for 9 years, and the only thing the owner does with it is bring another car to leave there once in a while.

All of which I think are reasons that would make it less valuable than the valuation, it makes me so that they want so much more.

Ok, deep breath, so a final offer that's within budget, and then walk away is probably going to be best all round.

Thanks as well DingALong for the insight into what it's like to renovate, I don't want to put us under more pressure than we really need. So sorry that you've had to go through all of that. I hope you get it finished soon and that it turns out how you want it :). I think I underestimated the stress involved in doing it.

I really just need to get into my head some positive thinking about finding somewhere else.

Thanks all, it's so ridiculous that people are that greedy for money that they don't see that they might get none at all as a result. The inheritance laws in France are a nightmare for this kind of thing, and houses can take years to sell while the children squabble amongst themselves. They must have known that with 6 of them they wouldn't get loads each.

The French market isn't so much the issue, although it has slowed, it's particularly that their lending rates are brilliant at the moment. The lowest ever recorded in history and fixed for the duration of the mortgage, so we could get something like 3.6% over 20 years, without even negotiating, which would be brilliant.

Although, where we're looking the market has been flooded lately by Brits trying to sell their second homes, which has forced the prices down quite considerably. Although the houses being sold by Brits are hilariously overpriced compared to the French counterparts!

Time to start another round of looking I guess.

At least we've left them stewing for a while since they turned down the offer

what everyone else said.
don't pay over the odds.
don't stretch yourself to the limit on a renovation because it will always cost more than you think.

Sounds like its out of your budget, but there will be something in your budget that has less work soon, houses come and go really quickly.

Yes, renovating isnt fun, with that amount of work you would really need a project manager making sure everything runs smoothly too, or you are paying workmen to sit around and drink tea. We had plumbers doing this waiting to finish the bathroom whilst the tiler was finishing off. I was painting the lounge with a basecoat at 4am one night as it needed to be done or would hold everyone else up. I would drop DD off at school, sprint over to the house with DS in the pushchair, work like crazy while he slept, go home, do the housework, run back to school, sit both of them on a rug whilst I worked on the hosue, go home, eat, kids to bed and back to the house again for either DH or myself - for 6 weeks! We are about 80% finished now, all the hard work is done and we have made the agreement to just stop until after Xmas. Everything else is just cosmetic but thats the stuff that takes the longest, light fittings, painting window frames, boxing in pipework, even a doorbell! We also had workmen who dropped out with no notice, much harder to chase and replace from another country. Its a much nicer house now and worth the work, but I wouldnt take on a house that needed that much work without an enormous budget.

Oh crikey DingALong, that sounds like hell. I'm so glad the end result has turned out well for you though.

Ok, you've got me convinced, it's not remotely do-able, it'd have to be a heck of a long way below our budget to be manageable.

Time to walk away and regroup :)

Thanks for all the input everyone, especially DingALong.

I'm just going to second what DingALong has said about the hard work renovating can be - and she is so right about the cosmetic work taking a ludicrous amount of time. Renovating an old house throws up all sorts of mysterious problems all the time - it's fine if you have a deep purse (e.g. 'all the windows are rotten, not just a few? fine, that's only another £1000 and I have it in my bank account now'), but not if you don't have savings available ready to spend on it, it would rapidly become very, very stressful, I think.

Thanks for adding that, GrendelsMum.

I'm really beginning to think twice about the whole thing. I think dh and I need to have a serious talk.

In France you can add the costs of renovating onto your mortgage in advance, but only if you're not already pushing the top of you borrowing options sadly. We'd have enough savings to allow us some sort of emergency fund, and our original evaluation covered what we thought would be the worse case scenario; but you're right, with an old house it could just be the tip of the renovation iceberg :(