Support thread for house sellers

[Spirael]

Just what it says on the tin, really! I'm sure there must be other stressed house sellers out there? Hopefully we can band together and get some small joy of (hopefully?) seeing our houses sell so we can get a move on!

This is a thread of hand holding and mutual support for the EA dealings, weeks of silence, frantic house tidying, no-show viewings, silly offers and tough decisions. This is not for house bashing and price slating. There are plenty of other threads for that!

I've been trying to sell for a year now. Had a surge of viewings earlier in the summer making the right noises, but all has gone quiet for the last few weeks.

However, we have a viewing booked for later this afternoon from someone who has sold their house and is able to proceed - wanting to move before Christmas. Currently swinging between pessimistic and optimistic, while trying not to look at the house we want to buy!

Anyone else out there? :)

We're trying to upsize to a four or possibly even five bedroomed home, and we'll buy one just as soon as we can sell our three bed home and release the money we need for the enormous deposit demanded!

We looked at extending, but we ideally want to move closer to friends and into an area with better schools. We also just don't have the land available, and it's doubtful it would help us to sell in the future or increase the value of the house.

Our EA has a key and they handle the viewings during the day or on Saturdays. We handle evening viewings. (Not that they ever show up!)

At least the house we're looking at doesn't seem to be in any hurry to go. It falls into the awkward £250k+ stamp duty bracket and due to the builder going bust it is incomplete, so would need a fair amount of work doing to it.

Hopefully that's putting everyone else off! But since we'd be intending to stay for 30+ years then we don't mind doing the work to make it as we want.

Our EA doesn't recommend coming off the market over Christmas. Primarily because he assures us houses do sell in that time period - otherwise EAs would shut down entirely.

Also because with the wonders of information available online, everyone and their dog can easily find out how long your house has been on the market. So laying low for a few months isn't going to fool anyone into thinking you're fresh and new.

However people do still come off the market over winter for various reasons. In our area where the market is flooded with similar properties that might actually help us, as for a few months we'd have less competition.

So I guess we'll continue to sit it out... 14 months on the market so far, I wonder how much longer it'll take? Some day, I might be able to have my treasured possessions back from being stored in boxes in the loft/garage!

On the plus side, because we can afford a bigger house we're managing to put aside a fair amount of money a month at the moment. I guess it means we could afford to take a bigger loss on our current house if we need to, or have a better deposit on our next one.

Though the desire to give up and blow all the money on an awesome holiday or new car or something actually immediately tangible is increasingly tempting!

An EA advising you to market just over the stamp duty threshold - presumably you are happy for the price to be negotiated by buyers to just under the threshold marykat, otherwise your EA is a numpty?

Spirael I think you're taking the right approach by staying on over winter. You could always specify no viewings over the holiday week. Folks who take their houses off and try to pass them off as 'new on the market' in the spring are living in the past. Thanks to Rightmove, Propertybee and various other tools - most savvy buyers will recognise them returning to market and mentally label them as 'unrealistic vendors'.

The days of de-listing over Christmas and holidays are long gone.

So's the concept of the 'Spring Bounce' and the 'Back to School Bonanza'.

People have internet now.

They're on Rightmove every day. EVERY DAY, and more often during the holidays when they have more time and are prepared to give more thought to houses that they'd previously dismissed.

I don't know YW, I wouldn't mentally label someone as unrealistic purely on the basis that they'd come off the market and gone on again, it's such a normal thing to do. Sometimes an agent appears to do it with whole batches of houses in one go, too.
If they go off the market and come on again at a higher price in a falling market I might raise an eyebrow though!

I might allow viewings during the holiday week but inform potential interested parties that since DH and I are working the viewings will instead be carried out by DD (2YO), as she will be at the house looking after her DGPs.

It's not unrealistic at all, people act on the advice of their EA because, in return for fees worth 1.5% of their house's value, they reasonably think they're getting professional advice.

Except most agents don't know their arse from their elbow about marketing, or consumer psychology, or indeed much else.

Re-listing, multiple listing and de-listing is a waste of time in the internet age, unless you have a real moron of an agent who's actively aggraviting your viewers.

If you're not getting offers, it's inevitably because you need to improve your presentation, or cut your price. There is usually little else to be done.

So many people watch Property Ladder and think they can present a house to a professional standard. They can't, because they spend money on all the wrong things.

This week I'm househunting on behalf of a client with £1.5m to spend in SW London. Every single house we've looked at is chock-full of granite, designer kitchens, Fired Earth and CP Hart. Yet none of their owners seem to understand that a survey will discount every square foot of loft extension or side extension you can't stand upright in, or that putting plastic windows into a premium property will lose you £50k immediately.

The problem is, many people in this market cannot accept that their price is unrealistic, or that their improvements haven't added tangible value. Interest rates can move much faster than public opinion.

I should say I do feel the pain of the people who have cut their APs substantially and still haven't had a sale.

My mother is currently trying to sell her house in the NW, worth £350k at the peak of the market, to be nearer her grandchildren. She's cut and cut her AP down to £290k over 18 months, still with no sniff of an offer.

The house is worth £225k in the current market, but the EA cannot bring herself to tell this to my mother for fear of alienating her, and my mother would never accept such an offer.

So Mum's decided to stay put, her life on hold in her late 60s, 200 miles away from her family, just for the sake of £70k that was never real money in the first place.

I could weep with frustration for her, and for the poor young families who need the space and the location for school, but don't earn the £100k household income her house would require to buy.

Spirael I think you are doing the right thing too...
We bought this house last year.
Viewed it mid oct and moved in on 2nd dec!!

1605 what do you see happening to the market next?
It is a horrible situation for everyone, both buyers and sellers, but I don't see an end to it - just an excruciatingly slow deflation of the bubble over the next couple of decades. Meanwhile a generation of kids lives in overcrowded houses without gardens to play in and a generation of older people rattles around in big ones they can't afford to heat with gardens they can't manage.

1605
Very perceptive posts.

1605 - shame that the EA is so gutless, they are partly responsible for the current situation.

I hear your frustration and wonder how your mother is going to react if/when she finally decides to sell and the price is even lower. (Might be the same as I don't think prices will go up for next 10/15 years)

"Never real money in the first place". Exactly.

Tunip...yes. I can see that too.
But too many vendors are like 1605s mum IMHO...they trust the EAs valuation which is at best a good guess and base their entire future on achieving that sum, whether it was achievable in the first pace seems not to matter :(
Our neighbours have just out their house in the market.
Pretty much exactly the same as ours, although not as modern (needs. New kitchen for example)
We bought ours last dec for £170k.
They have just out theirs in at £200k
Because "that's how much there'd to move back to the SE"
(Shakes head in wonder)

There are a lot of potential downsizers just like 1605's mother round here. I think that many of them are relying on their house being what it would have been in 2007 for an income in their retirement. Lots of people seem to have been given terrible advice about this kind of thing and are now kind of stuck. It's sad, particularly their houses are worth much less than they would be even in this market, if they were so in need of modernisation.

There are also plenty of unrealistic potential upsizers though, who seem to have decided upon an asking price based entirely on what they need to buy the kind of big house in the really expensive area they want. These are usually the sort of people who insist that their house is 'priced to sell' (in fact, the use of this phrase on house marketing materials is a clear signal to potential buyers that the vendors are unrealistic). But, they don't really have to move, so they don't tend to drop their price.

It's very frustrating for buyers to have to sift through all this to try to find houses that are genuinely up for sale.

I wish I could say, Tunip. As I said before, this is the most perplexing market I've seen in 15 years.

I operate at what I call the middle-middle of the London market - prices between £1m and £1.5m.

Over £1.25m, stuff is flying. It's genuinely frightening the prices people are prepared to pay in areas that many of my clients would not even have been prepared to consider as recently as 12 months ago. Some areas have seen 20% price rises.

Between £1m and 1.25m, it's sticky. This price range tends to be the last one that attracts families who need large mortgages to buy, but expectations are high. Buyers tend to be the top dog in their professions and they find it hard to compromise. Best house at best price will sell quick, but only developers sell like this and there aren't many operating at the moment because they can't get the funding. Amateurs will not cut for a year, by which time the buyer has moved on.

Below £1m but above £700k it is dead, but not for the reasons you'd think. There is tons of demand, but no supply. In London's zone 2 at the moment, you could sell an £800k natural 4 bed every day of your life, and not need an estate agent to do it.

Of course, everyone who owns an £800k house thinks it's worth £1m, and so on up the ladder.

And then they wonder why they can't get a sale.

Mind if I join in? I've just had an EA to value our house and he has said he would think it would go for £190-200K (they have just sold one on our street for about £195K which had better living space but smaller bedrooms). We have viewed a house in the same village which is on at £265K which I would hope we could get for less than £250K but it is a lady looking to downsize who didn't seem to be that convinced on moving and was talking about painting and putting it back on in the spring when I viewed. We were FTBs when we bought our house and the thought of buying and selling at the same time is just terrifying. I also look around my house and see the million little things we meant to do in the last 3 years like repaint the woodwork and recarpet upstairs and wonder what people will think of our house.
We would really like more living space but there is so little around in our price bracket and what there is (and is decent) generally goes quickly - just can't see how this is ever going to happen.

Wow, Toomuchtea, I am gobsmacked at the differences in those valuations.

Toomuchtea - Is there a typo there or are you saying that EAs said your home was "worth" somewhere between 450k and 700k??

Must be a typing error.

1605 the price I'm hoping to get for my house (£10k below asking price) is the same price as similar houses on neighbouring streets have sold for recently, but the feedback I get is that the bedrooms are too small (the one thing I can't do much about!)

So I really, really hope it's not overpriced. The one offer I've had was £20k below the asking price - I said 'if you can meet in the middle we'll have a deal' but they couldn't. I get slightly despondent that somehow my house doesn't quite have whatever these other houses have that gives them the edge over mine.

Toomuchtea - I think that demonstrates what a bunch of useless idiots a lot of EAs are. A quarter of a million pounds of difference on a max 700k house. Sack the lot of them and advertise yourself.

That's a huuuuuge range of valuations but I guess - EAs don't need any qualifications, and as 1605 says some of them have a woeful grasp of consumer psychology and haven't learned how to deal with this market (being schooled during the bubble).

Even surveyors who need to be accredited are scared of being sued for previous bubble 'over valuations'. But then, without easy credit - who is to say what any house is worth? Houses were bid up by stupid IO and self cert and 125% mortgages during the bubble years - when you could have shaved a labrador and it would have come out of Northern Rock with a mortgage. Of course those who have trousered a lot of money from property during this credit bubble find it hard to admit that their gains were ultimately from the same bubble that led to the banks being bailed out. It's easy to hate bankers but hard to repudiate that 'paper profit' that 1605 was talking about.

Some awesomely astute posts there 1605 - that's very much the elephant in the room isn't it - those bubble valuations were just 'thin air' - and were only real if you sold your house at peak and cashed in the profit. Basing one's life around achieving such a historical profit will be heartbreaking for those that try in this market. Timing, as ever, is everything.