Any first time buyers

[Pickledonion24]

Deposit off 150000 house budget 300000 max 350000 if perfect house booked my first viewing today

But surely that only matters if you’re looking to sell? Or if you can’t pay your mortgage?
We bought (FTB) in June this year. Not London. The local market is stagnating, and I imagine it will drop at some point.
However we’re not planning to sell for a long long time. Our mortgage is insured. We can easily afford the repayments on one wage. I don’t care if it’s worth less on paper than we paid for it.

Sorry to hear that OP. Keeping my fingers crossed for all of us

Hi all,

We are FTBs as well!

Interesting post, TurquoiseDress! We have started looking about 6 weeks ago, but we have a tiny budget as I am setting up my own business, while my partner is working fulltime. We are in London, looking in East Ham/Manor Park, Woolwich/Plumstead, or even Croydon with our tiny budget. All are "up and coming", but I like East Ham the most. Where abouts are you looking?

Our plan is to low ball, we have the time on our side, so going to take it slow until the right flat comes along! And yes I agree, we need sellers who NEED to sell!

Where are you based chunkiebride? Sounds like an amazing project! Was getting a mortgage for your doer upper hard? I would love to do something similar, but being in London I don't think we can afford a terraced house, unfortunately.

Good luck all!

We just agreed a house at the start of the month. It was originally on the market for £10k more than when we viewed it so we did have to go to the full asking price and it needs a lot of work that we won’t immediately be able to do, but I think rates are still very low for mortgages so now is as good a time as any to buy.

We have stretched to our maximum budget to buy a house that will be a good size for us even if we have a child in the near future so we can hopefully stay here for at least 10 years

@BuildingThings we are in South Hertfordshire

@BuildingThings good luck with your search.
It’s worth it when something comes along, and everything happens for a reason

FTB too, Ecureuil same with us, the house may drop in the future (1-2 years) depends on Brexit (London and outer London), but I don't care, we pay too much in rent already, plus we are not looking for million house, and focus on good school zone and transport, so I doubt it will drop that much.
We didn't mean to low ball hard on the property we are buying now (too naive to negotiate hard), but that's our max budget, so there isn't any way around.

BuildingThings

Initially we were looking in Lewisham/Hither Green- but quickly realised that it was completely unrealistic for our budget!

We've focused on the Bromley borough now- mainly Beckenham/Penge area, we really like what we've seen so far but have not had much luck!

Although if am pissed off that if we’d bought 8 weeks later we’d have saved £4.5k in stamp duty!!

I read the news today about stamp duty incentive for FTBs!

Sadly I do not think that we can benefit from this as DH previously had a property up in York so we will be excluded from this incentive
He made about 5 grand in total after owning it for several years- every little helps but this amount is not really much of a dent in the deposit you need for a London property!

I guess the 300k threshold won't go far in London, but obviously it will all (hopefully) help to make things a teeny bit more affordable.

Prices are dropping but that's not necessarily a reason to avoid buying now. There are a lot of desperate sellers around and some bargains to be had. Yes - prices might get a little worse before they improve again but you'll never know for certain when the market is at its lowest point.

Just saw the news too about STD exempt for FTB under £300K. We are extremely lucky I guess, totally not expected. Got a good price too, just 2 days ago.

Yep, we just bought for £299k as FTB’s! We could have had a new bathroom with that money...

Bad luck Ecur
I'm so glad though. When the right house comes along, that'll make a real difference.

torquise If you are a FTB just ask your solicitor to put the stamp duty through under your NINO instead of DH's and you should still save the duty. It's like when a FTB gets a mortgage with a non FTB you still get access to the FTB rates. Worth speaking to your Solicitor

Templeton
Thanks for that- we don't have a solicitor at this point, we did have one earlier in the year when we instructed them but we didn't get very far as the sale fell through.

From everything we've googled it doesn't look likely that we can benefit from the SD cut.

What does NINO stand for? Forgive my ignorance!

I am still continuing my daily obsession with Rightmove!

We are actually moving out of our rented flat in a couple of weeks- v sad to be packing everything up but obviously happy to be saving some money on the rent.

We are moving further out into SE London- DH's good friend from school owns a property and has agreed to let us have it on a rolling contract basis in case we find something to buy in the spring.

The main reason for doing this move is the looming primary school applications and we want to be in catchment for a few of the schools.

But also as we'll not be renting through an agent or paying full market rate of rent, it'll allow us to save a little bit more each month.

We are very keen to become FTBs (sort of) very soon!

How are you doing OP?
I put an offer in on one I viewed today. Won't hear until Monday, and I'm thinking I might not get it. I'm not prepared to go higher than my initial offer because although the property is worth more than that, I need to make adaptions for me to live there. I'll be alright if it's turned down.