How far in advance of being able to afford to buy would you start looking?

[HollyBollyBooBoo]

I am saving like a demon, will have finances in place in Spring.

Have cautiously started looking at Rightmove to see what is out there in my price range & location. I won't actually waste people's time and go and view properties yet, but then when would you start going to view? A couple of months before I could buy or really wait until I am truly in a position so that I can make a credible offer if the right house appears before my nose in the first week of looking?!

If you use the mozilla browser, you can download the PropertyBee app, which shows the history of listings on rightmove, primelocation, etc. That will give you an idea of how long something has taken to sell (if you are searching sold STC listings as well), as well as how long something has been on the market, whether any offers have fallen through, what the original asking price was...

The UK housing market is so regionalised that it's meaningless to say anything about completion times without knowing where you are, what kind of property/ies you are dealing with...y

We've just put our flat on the market today; we won't be in a position to actually make an offer until we get one ourselves.

I've been looking at Rightmove etc since Christmas!

We started actually going to see houses when we started talking to the estate agents here. I wanted to see a few to get an idea of what we could afford in reality (i.e. without the wide angle lenses!)

We just saw three. We said no to two of them and we liked one - we said we'd be back for a second viewing if still on the market when we get an offer.
I think it was really useful to me to get a more tangible idea of what wer could afford.

I'm going to leave the viewings now until we look like we've at least had a few viewings from people who seem interested. But I think it's fair enough to go have a look before you're actually ready to make an offer if you think you're not so far off. Then you can offer on the one you want as soon as you're in a position to do so.That's the opposite of wasting time IMO! :)

Good luck :)

I think it depends how well you know what you want. It's taken us about two years of driving round potential areas and looking at different sorts of houses to discover exactly what we are looking for. Now that my house is finally on the market and I know how much is involved in getting the house ready for a viewing I suddenly feel slightly bad about viewing houses that really weren't going to work for us; only slightly though - it was all immensely valuable research and now we know exactly what we want and where, and we can offer in full confidence that we are trying to buy the right property.

Like others said, it depends on the property market in your area. We started looking about 3 months before finances were in place, ended up buying about 18 months later and places we'd seen first were still in the market.

For us it was helpful to get an idea of different areas, what we were prepared to compromise on and what was non-negotiable. In a fast moving market I wouldn't have looked that far in advance in case I'd missed a dream house.

We found somewhere a week after accepting an offer. 3rd place we looked at. But was a total one-off fluke it came up. I had been rightmove-lurking for months beforehand though so knew what we wanted moved off the market pretty quickly.