What I learnt when buying a house...

[twinklecow]

Feel free to add...

1. By far the biggest lesson was having good solicitors in the chain. We asked our estate agent and she was brilliant but we would have moved weeks earlier if the solicitors on either end of our chain had been good. I would make it a condition of our offer/ acceptance that each person in the chain is using a solicitor whom the estate agents knows to be good.

1. Think really really hard about all practicalities of any offers you make. We made two offers on lovely houses one at the top of an incredibly steep hill, the other with no shop/pub/ anything near by. Still drive past both and thank our lucky stars we were out bid.

1. The right house is probably the one that scores highest average on most of your criteria. Not the one with a wow but compromises. We adore our house but it wasn’t obvious to us at the time.

1. “They want to sell to a family” is an estate agents trick to bid up you and any developers.

1. Cash buyers aren’t necessarily an advantage in your chain. They are usually investors so subject to the vagaries of the market and not emotionally invested in the purchase.

1. Get your buyer emotionally invested in your house. If it’s a family send them

Links to/ news about local schools, couples - same with local venues, send pictures of garden as it blooms etc.

1. Expect to spend money even if it looks lovely, houses where people know they will sell are rarely well cared for in recent years below the surface. We have replaced a blown up boiler, sorted various plumbing issues and other more minor repairs.

1. You can’t book a removal company without exchanging and it’s hard to find a removal company that’s decent if you only have a week between exchange and completion.

Useful ? What did you learn?

Solicitors can pay a referral fee if they want to. It is perfectly legal. Shit Co vetancing is also big business. I know someone who runs a law firm. The majority if their turn over comes from conveyancing.arfins are low so they use conveyancers who are not lawyers and give them more work than they can realistically do to a good standard to maximise profits. They live new builds because they require very little work but they can charge the same as they would for a second habd house.

Estate agents are only there to make money, therefore want the highest price for a property, regardless of how they get it. They are not your friends
On the contrary, they want to SELL your property otherwise they don't get their commission.
1.5% of No Sale is nothing.
Getting you to drop the price by £20,000 will mean less eventual commission, but increases the likelihood of getting any commission at all.
Jam today...

Solicitors can and do pay a referral or introduction fee to EAs, as do mortgage brokers. I've always steered clear and used independents.
I would also never buy a new build, too many problems, poorly built and corners cut all the time. In general. I realise there will be exceptions to this, but have worked with most of the major developers in the U.K. amd am very unimpressed by them.

Another "avoid new builds" from me. There are probably exceptions, but round my way they are synonymous with poor build quality, little to no storage, unhelpful dimensions, "poor doors" and more.

My one addition to this thread is that (so far) buying the worst house on the best street has worked for us in terms of amenities and property value. The first time round, this meant buying an ex-council flat in a lovely conservation area, to the horror of my friends. It meant I could afford a central-ish bit of London and was a genuinely good place to live (and bomb-proof!).

Solicitors do not give estate agents back handers

when I worked at an estate agents they used to recommend a particular (shit) firm of solicitors because they would pay the estate agents a cut of any business they got from them.

Agree with advice re Internet conveyancing. I used an internet conveyancing firm when I bought my house - I was a young first time buyer who knew nothing and was desperate to save money as tbh I could barely afford to pay for it all (so glad I bought when I did though as prices have risen so much since that I'd never have been able to buy after that point in time!). They were so slow with everything, it was ridiculous. I was a FTB buying a vacant property so no chain - it could have been completed within 6 weeks. It took 4.5 months due to conveyancing delays, I had to reapply for the mortgage as the offer expired after 3 months.

I'd advise always make sure you have a few thousand set by for all the things you'll discover need fixing after you move in. Things have a habit of conking out 3 months after completion (bitter experience)!

things I have learned from buying our house

• get decent solicitiors and do not take the first recommendation from the ea without at least googling them first

• check check and check again when your boundaries lie and get the solicitors to absolutely pick apart any rights of way.

• drive / walk past on different days, different times, school drop off time, rush hour, Saturday afternoon, bank hols if you can. What the street is like on a grey October day could be worlds apart from an august bank holiday.

• talk to the neighbours. we didn't do this and we wish we had.

• try not to fall in love with it just in case (until you have the keys)

my grandmothers advice - take a compass to make sure the garden is south facing!

We are looking to buy and now your putting me off!!!! Lol
No really we are in a position to purchase hut what we can afford means moving out of the area a bit from schools etc have three kids and two would need to commute to secondary schools. There is a good primary we are in the catchment of, would you buy now or get child in school first? And hope in that year something changes and you can buy in the area?

Have a great mortgage broker - ours was amazing and made the whole scary mortgage piece so easy. He also recommended the solicitors and they were fab too.

Oh and he saved me from a pushy estate agent that told us we had to go and see their mortgage person for a two hour appointment with all of our financials to proceed with the sale (even though we had an AIP and had no interest in looking for a mortgage)

Not all cash buyers are unemotional investors: DH and I sold our house last year and have been in rented accommodation ever since, waiting for the right property to come up - and the reason we sold our house? We fell in love with a property which then fell through at the last minute, leaving us with our life in storage.

So don't fall totally in love with a property until it's yours, either.

And get a survey. That's just cost us £1200 but I think it's probably saved us nearer £200,000 of unavoidable structural repairs on a house that looked 'perfect' from the outside.

I don’t agree with point one fully, assuming I’ve read it correctly

I buy and sell a lot of property and use the firm I have always used in a certain part of the country. However I buy property rarely in that area anymore and basically never within the area of the estate agents I now frequent. As such the estate agents are unlikely to know about my law firm at all

I think if I am right what you mean is a good lawyer and not some random firm that is the cheapest online place in outer space that you can only phone once a week at 3:12am on the dot

It’s swings and roundabouts really, some firms are good and others not

Same for estate agents

And buyers ..... and sellers

Fwiw I think it's really important during negotiations over anything related to a sale or purchase that you try to put yourself in the buyer or vendor's shoes and think how they might feel to be on the receiving end of what you are proposing, etc.

Do not expect your house to look the same as when you last viewed it.

We came back two months later to a mess.
Took 3 days of morning and night cleaning

We’ve bought and sold several houses and only once been part of a chain (even then it went smoothly). It’s often worth renting for a while to break the chain, and if you’re moving out of area it lets you get the feel of a new place before committing to a purchase.

This:
"Don't complete on a Friday and never complete on a Friday before a Bank Holiday. It's just asking for problems.'

Allow at least 2 weeks between exchange and completion.
Do not get involved in a chain with a divorcing couple.
If it's a probate sale, make sure you have sight of the grant of probate before incurring any costs.
If you're buying a property which is tenanted when you view, your solicitor will rightly insist that you can't exchange until the place is vacated.Do not consider exchanging until the tenants have left.
Take photographs before you exchange - I knew someone who offered on a place with a Smallbone kitchen, only to find out that that it had been ripped out and replaced with a cheap one between exchange and completion.
Understand that things do sometimes go wrong - for example with a long chain, it can take all day for the money to pass to the end of the chain, and it is possible that it might not arrive in time to physically complete that day. I have seen it happen more than once. If you are at the end of a long chain, consider whether it's worth making arrangements to stay somewhere else overnight, rather than not getting the keys till 4pm ( or the next working day).
I have known removal companies try to fit too many jobs into one day - so at 3pm they down tools and move on to the next job. Difficult if you can't move in to your new place because you haven't got the keys till late. So make sure the removal company will be there all day! Ask them to specifically confirm that.

1.Don't rely on Internet banking for anyone to transfer the deposit, as you can't transfer more than around 10k that way. Bonus points if the error message only goes to Mr Buyer out in a war zone who can't read emails, leaving Mrs Buyer unaware of any problem.

2.If giving your solicitor a cheque for the deposit, make sure he banks it and doesn't say 'why don't you just send it electronically, it'll be quicker' - see 1.

1. If it turns out your buyer needs to re-send a deposit in the next 20 minutes on a Saturday before their bank closes, it is well worth agreeing to pay for her cab and the £20 telegraphic transfer fee so as to get it done and prevent the chain falling apart, not to mention the phone bill talking her through the process (see 1 and 2).

1. Get a solicitor recommended by the estate agent, or a rival one. Nearby. Being able to drop in with files and be nice to the receptionist really helps. Especially when they find out about the numpty solicitor in 1.

1. Book movers provisionally well in advance. They kept asking us each week how it was going and when we had to postpone by. Make sure movers do a quote only on seeing your place and check the loft. And get them to pack, or at least to come round a couple days before to check on you and offer to pack the rest.

Meet new neighbours before move and ask them to put bins in the road to block off space for the van, if the council won't do it.

Put signs on each room of new house with name of room so movers know where to put labelled boxes and furniture. Speeds things up loads especially if they are carrying stuff from halfway down the street.

Keep some cash for repairs in first few weeks, but don't spend much on furtitute or appliances (hi, Gumtree!) until you've lived there a few months and know how the shape of moving round rooms works.

And speak to neighbours before offering - we didn't offer on one house as the greasy chain-smoking neighbours were clearly a nightmare from the 10 minute racist monologue we got on saying hello...

A dd used the EA's recommended solicitor when buying her first house. We couldn't advise another since the last high st. one we'd used was useless. I would have been very anti using the EA's choice before, but the whole thing was wrapped up - from offer accepted to getting the keys - in 6 weeks. And I'd told her to expect 3 months - when she and her dp were in an expensive and inconvenient short term rental.

It wasn't any more expensive than the average other, either.
Needles to say I'd never dismiss them out of hand again.

My tip is to assume it will all be a nightmare, then there's a (small) chance you won't be disappointed!

For one purchase, we (naively not knowing about referral fees) used a cheap internet conveyancer recommended by the EA. As it turned out, he was absolutely brilliant! He chased things up, was always available on the phone, and always knew what was happening.

Sadly, when we came to buy our next house, he'd moved on. We went for a (very expensive) local firm of solicitors, believing you get what you pay for. The person who oversaw our case was never available, didn't chase things up, and made a crucial mistake, which gave us all sorts of hassle when selling. She said she'd put it right, then went on maternity leave, without explaining the situation to her colleagues. Nightmare!