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Property/DIY

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Original poster

House selling/buying - how many houses do people look at?

13 replies

Lottie4 · 09/12/2013 14:23

We are putting our house on the market next month and just wondered how many people have looked at your house (if sold recently) or how many houses you looked at before you were able to complete on your purchase.

We moved in 1999 and it was a nightmare. Properties were selling within 24 hours, so looked at a lot, went to put offer in and they'd gone. Also, our first chain fell apart 2/3 days before we were likely to exchange, so had to start all over again, so at that time we looked at about 20 properties. We put the offer in on our present house while still doing the first viewing to secure it.

OP posts:

Lucylouby · 09/12/2013 15:06

Only one person looked at ours (just waiting to exchange) and the market wasn't/isnt moving really quick. We we lucky, the lady looked at it, liked it and made us an offer. We looked at three properties and picked the first one we looked at.

kronenborg · 09/12/2013 16:06

we were buyers with nothing to sell...we have been looking for the right house for over a year.

in that time, i would say we've actually viewed perhaps 20 places - but with many hundreds viewed online.

these days you can do a pretty good amount of "due diligence" online, thereby excluding lots of properties without even needing to do a physical viewing.

by the time we actually set foot in a house for a viewing, we knew it had to be a serious prospect.

hyperspacebug · 09/12/2013 16:34

we are house hunting in incredibly popular area and I've lost two bids so far despite bidding well over the asking price :(
we've viewed about 20+ properties so far in 8 months - we don't bother looking at non-prospects for fun
I'm exhausted and prices are rising and rising, but my DS is already settled in very good school in the area, so not keen to move out of the area (we are renting)

//depressed

jacktherat · 09/12/2013 22:07

We didn't have anything to sell, and looked at about 20 places in about 6-7 weeks.

AngryFeet · 09/12/2013 22:13

About 10 places in a couple of months. We had nothing to sell. We wanted a certain area and knew we could never get our dream house on our budget so based our decision on what we could do to a place (space to extend etc). Houses in this area are fairly scarce at our budget and we needed to move by the end of the year so there was no point hanging on for something we would likely never find anyway :)

Mum2Fergus · 09/12/2013 22:42

FTB approx a year ago...this was the 5/6th house I looked at over space if 6 months (quite a small search area)

LunaticFringe · 09/12/2013 23:28

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

soundevenfruity · 09/12/2013 23:43

We got tired on our 3rd weekend of back to back viewing with agents taking groups of prospective buyers on a tour of completely unsuitable properties. We couldn't do weekdays at all so that left Saturdays. In my experience many properties that agents kept online had been sold already or were in the process of. That was majorly annoying because we couldn't research. I think our house was 16th property we saw as it was the last one on the 3rd day. The good bit was that is in an awkward corner of a popular area so we had 4 viewings after that. It's utter madness to make such a huge financial commitment after spending 15 minutes walking around.

sleepyhead · 09/12/2013 23:45

We had 8 or so viewings lined up for our place (couple of months ago) but the first person to view offered and we accepted, so only showed 4 lots of people round. It went much quicker than we were expecting.

For our purchase, we suddenly found ourselves on a fairly tight deadline due to the quick sale, but there were a limited number of properties that met our criteria for size, location and price. We viewed them all (6) over the course of a week, put offers in on two and had one accepted... we're meant to be moving later on this week (fingers crossed!).

We did the selling and buying within a fortnight, but although I still have the alerts set up in Rightmove etc there has been nothing new on the market that we would even have gone to view so I don't think we missed out on anything by moving quickly.

Original poster

Lottie4 · 10/12/2013 11:01

Thanks for your replies. If ours were to sell quickly, I think there's only three houses that we would want to view, but it depends on if they sell and what else comes along. Staying in the same area is more important than getting a larger house, but it's still nice to have a choice.

OP posts:

SquinkiesRule · 10/12/2013 16:30

We sold to the second people who looked at ours. We are house hunting now and are on house number 7 tomorrow for a viewing.
When we bought the house that we just sold I looked at about 20 houses.

wonkylegs · 10/12/2013 16:51

We visited approximately 35houses out of a shortlist of 50.
We were relocating and looking for a house for the next 20yrs or so. We wanted something with character, size and potential. The only fixed characteristics was it's location it had to be within 10miles of job.

Of the people who looked at our house - 6 people offered within a week, most of them had not seen anything else. Not many houses like ours were on the Market and so when it came up we had loads of interest.

soundevenfruity · 10/12/2013 21:58

There is a property-bee add-on for Firefox web browser. It gives you a brief history of updates to a property on rightmove. So you will know when property has come to market, how many times it was updated to sold and then back. It can really help with negotiations. ;)

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