Is anyone else trying to sell a house and feels like poking themselves in the eye with a sharp stick?

[Pinkjenny]

House has been on the market since July. We have changed estate agents, which obviously made no difference as it's not a new instruction. Am sick of it all, sick of the pointless viewers, sick of the useless feedback, sick of always being pipped at the post, sick of the market, sick of my house.

To Greentown - you have absolutely no idea of my personal circumstances I can assure you.

However, I also can post links.

uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/Worst-house-price-slump-yahoofinanceuk-405310099.html

CBI comment this morning "It has been a credit-driven recession and will be a credit-driven recovery". Everything's fine then!

ha ha ha - you guys are the best!!!

I love ya - all three of ya - one for all and all for one - the three houseketeers.

I'm speculating what must be on your ipods - Down, down, deeper and down?

You've won - I can't fight your negativity anymore - have fun down there gals!

DoesBuggerAll - I agree with your analysis of the economy. It is still farly bouyant in the SE but that depends entirely on the state of financial markets. If teh stockmarket fell then it would come off the boil sharply. Elsewhere in the Uk the economy is in a dire state with businesses closing everywhere.

In general, house prices in the UK can and should fall by substantial amounts to make them afordable again. The USA, Ireland, Spain ae allm arkets where house prices have fallen very substantially - in some areas by 50% or more.

The UK is to some extent an anomally in not yet seeing a major house price correction. My analysis suggests a fall of around 30% in real terms would bring house prices back to fair value. In order to achieve that though we need either wage inflation (ie nominal wages rise) or a house price deflation (ie nominal house price falls). Neither have yet happened hence the housing market has stagnated.

In my own case, I made an offer on a house a few weeks ago. It is an unusual house that has been on the market 3 years. I made a chain free, cash offer at the same price as someone else did 2 years ago. The owner has not even replied. There are many many houses round us like this that have been on thr market for several years. In the main, they are older vendors simply unwilling to reduce the asking price.

Whatever, we rent a house for a lot less than a mortgage and in no hurry to move and our landlord cannot afford to sell. We can wait.

and d'Artagnan too! Hooray, this just gets better.

Well, they do say misery loves company.

thing is, for all the people who are sitting tight and waiting for the market to drop, there are probably just as many people like me who need to move so are having to take the pain and pay current prices, and the longer it goes on, the more people like me there will be.

we are selling our house at about what it was worth at the height of the market in 07, and buying a place about 7% over height of the market value. yes i think we're overpaying, but the vendors won't take any less because they don't need to move. in theory we could rent, but there is bugger all available, and prices are astronomical... so we could pay £30k to rent a not very nice house for a year or we can overpay on a house by £30k to live somewhere we actually love.

I see the Halifax just reported this morning House prices post biggest annual fall in 1-1/2 yrs.

"House prices suffered their biggest annual fall in 1-1/2 years in April as worries about the economic outlook deterred buyers, mortgage lender Halifax said on Monday."

Housing is just a market like any other. Prices went up and reached bubble proportions and so need to fall back (relative to wages) to attract buyers again. Nothing magical or unusual about that process. Just takes time.

From the FT citing the same Halifax report:

"Halifax said that house sales show further signs of stabilising. The number of mortgages approved to finance house purchase, a leading indicator of completed house sales, increased by two per cent between February and March, according to Bank of England data."

There's a lot of "glass half empty" talk here. And a refusal to acknowledge that things have bottomed out and when you hit bottom, the only way is up.
That will take some time and there will be relative stability for a number of years but the biggest house price falls happened in 2009 and if anyone is waiting for that to happen again, then I believe they'll be waiting awhile.

I don't think things have 'bottomed out' at all!
On Friday my DH's company rolled out letters about consultation periods for redundancies - circa 40% of staff will be made redundant (private company based in 3 major cities employing around 100 people). This is in a sector which is supposedly over the worst. My DM's workplace (public sector) has just gone through a big 'restructuring' process.

Irony is that we had just had our mortgage approved as FTB. We certainly won't be going anywhere now... And all of our FTB friends are putting purchasing on hold as prices are just too high and it's very hard to save up the amounts needed for deposits with living costs so high.

Businesses fail all the time - even in boom times. I'm not suggesting this is a boom time and it would be niave to expect in the current climate that there will be no more redundancies - but as one knows, business failure happens all the time.
But, as one swallow does not make a spring nor does another redundancy make an economic collapse.
There will be time on the bottom before things go up but any economy moves in cycles and different sectors have different cycles. The housing market is no longer on the bottom, relative to 2009.
The one thing that could take it to the bottom would be mass unemployment, on a far greater scale than we are seeing today and predicted over the next 12 months.
But of course, it's worth bearing in mind, that if such a collapse should happen, the people on here wanting to profit from that scenario, would likely be on the scrapheap with everyone else and unable to get mortgages for houses that may well be dirt cheap and we'll all be laughing then

Keep your chins up everyone - whatever happened to the Blitz spirit and the stiff upper lip?

Sorry to hear that, PiggyMad. Hope he comes through it ok.

Greentown said: "But of course, it's worth bearing in mind, that if such a collapse should happen, the people on here wanting to profit from that scenario, would likely be on the scrapheap with everyone else and unable to get mortgages for houses that may well be dirt cheap and we'll all be laughing then"

Oh I'm under no illusions Greentown, I'm well aware that I may well be unemployed along with the many others and hence unable to trade-up to a bigger house when they are cheaper. That doesn't mean I should panic and trade-up now just to take on someone elses large mortgage debt whilst they get off scot-free. Nope, I'll just wait a while and let 'em burn when prices collapse. Besides, if I manage another year or two of saving I won't even need a mortgage to buy a bigger place.

Yes, sorry to hear the news PiggyMad. A major defence company near me has shed several hundred staff in three rounds of redundancies over the last year. They were still in the first 90 day consultation period when they started another. Maybe HR is the career to be in?

Cheer up people. It's not Portugal.

We're not too worried as we don't have a large mortgage to service thankfully and could just about manage on my income alone. Fingers crossed though!
I just think it is madness to think that things are going to pick up in the near future!

After everything I said this mornng our vendor just came back and accepted 15.5% off the asking price without a fight. Now we just need to squeeze some more out of them.

Maybe the market is softer than we thought.

Mathanxiety, you're right it's not Portugal. It's worse than that.

Seriously the UK has a worse public debt problem than Portugal and Greece for that matter. The one thing we've got going for us is our credibility amongst our creditors. If we lose that for example by not tackling our deficit meaningfully then Portugal here we come.

DBA - HR definitely not a good career move. Ours has been axed completely and we now have a central hub run by a skeleton team to serve all UK sites via phone and e-mail.

And another one here. Almost 18 months on the market, dropped price, accepted ridiculous offer which means we will move to a much smaller house, only need to move because of DHs job loss; EA a complete pain, solicitors not talking to each other, keep promising we will exchange, then a problem crops up down the chain. SO FED UP. Lend me your stick!!

Well done MoreBeta - we ha someone take 2 weeks to accept our offer.
Good luck with it - are you going to tell us whereabout's it is?

Its not in London or SE.

You're a tease - but congratulations anyway.
I thought you'd be in/near London.

Well, we are on the other side, as purchasers, with NOTHING TO SELL (!), and it's equally frustrating, but I do sympathise. We have one really good EA who seems to phone us about everything, off the wall stuff which usually doesn't work out, but hey ho she's trying. We don't waste people's time though. We do scrutinise particulars as I cannot think of anything worse than rocking up for a nosey at a house which you are not interested in. The ineptness of some EAs though is woeful. Do they actually want to sell the house???????????

The RICs survey out today suggest there has been a marked increase in the number of properties coming on to the market but no signifcant increase in buyers (especially the first time buyer variety). All of which is generally expected to keep downward pressure on prices fo rythe coming year.

We have another viewing tonight. I have taken the probably ludicrous decision to tell our EA that we only want viewings from people who are in a position to proceed.

Will see how it goes for a few months and then no doubt change my mind back again.

Right, now to finish work and put my best hostess face on