Help! Stressed about where to buy!

[IWantAWittyUsername]

I'm driving myself (and my DH) mad

We are under offer (for the third time) and have been waiting for the vendors we are buying from to find somewhere (for 6 months - hence why we keep losing our buyers - don't blame them!). We accept that we will not get this house as the vendors clearly have no intention of moving but we now love the area and the housing stock (all very similar) which is on the outskirts of a town. We are currently in a city which we really like but we are desperate for more space which we can't afford in our current area.

The dilemma is do we stay where we are and buy a slightly bigger house we've seen (which I'm not excited about at all) or do we wait and buy in the area we love (where not much comes on the market)?!

My instincts tell me that spending hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy something that I'm not really interested in is totally wrong. The only reason I'm driving myself mad is the worry of how long it'll take to find something else where we want to be and whether we will still be under offer ourselves or have to go through all that pain again. Argh!!

Can you bear to go into rented as an alternative? That way you'll have gone through the pain of selling and will only have the pain of buying to deal with.

If prices are stable or dropping (as they certainly are in my part of London, for example) I think renting for the time being is a very good option.

Thanks for responding. We can't go into rented as I'm on maternity and scared about reapplying for a mortgage (which we'd have to do). Not to mention it'll cost us £10k to exit our mortgage and rental prices are +£1k on our mortgage! I would love to sell up and rent but don't feel that it's a good option for us.

*maternity leave

Wait....... moving is so expensive that you don't want all those costs twice.

Thanks - we've decided to wait for the right house. I guess I knew that was the right answer but it's always good to get someone else to endorse that!