New build - part exchange

[Hubby1980]

Hi all,

Does anyone have any experience of buying a new build house and doing a part exchange?

DW is super keen to move, we currently have a 4 bed detached, but she wants to move to another one in a better catchment area.

One of the house builders offers part exchange scheme, just wondered if anyone had ever done that, and if so do the "independent" estate agents ridiculously under value the house?

If it's not too outrageously low it might be worth it to avoid estate agent fees and a chain ( I hate moving!!)

Any wisdom would be appreciated! Thanks

I believe your house has to be worth a certain amount for them to allow you to do it.

Our house was worth too much compared to the house we wanted to get or something!

We looked at it but the builder only paid 90% of the average valuation so you'd need to find out what they would actually pay for the house and if they would cover legal fees.

Following out of interest.

We did, fantastic experience. We got market price for our house, and from start to finish (from first viewing to us moving in) was 6 weeks. It was the last house on the development though.

WBWife yep, it's the same sort of deal with these ones, house you buy has to be at least 30% more than the one you are selling

Luckily DW has expensive taste! :-)

We did. Very easy way of buying a new home. Our old house sold very quickly (within 1 week) so we received cash back from the developers as well.

Would certainly recommend it.

Yes. We did this last year. Barratt Homes.
I definitely recommend it, it removes a large part of the stress involved (selling your home) although increased one aspect of it (viewings from umpteen estate agents)
Barratt organised three independant valuations from local estate agents. The average they came up with was £325k which we thought was very good but also worked out at 30% less than the one we were buying which we took as a sign. We agreed. Signed on dotted line. House immediately put on market at this price.
They used the same three agents - basically whoever got the sale got the commission. This did mean that I was constantly getting phonecalls to arrange viewings, which I was in charge of (not just from the 3 agents, but from different branches of the same agents) I found this quite hard work, because I had to be present (I wasn't about to give the whole world a set of house keys)
Market was a bit slow. They had to drop the price and eventually the house sold for £303k. This meant Barratt were out of pocket by £22k, not us.
It also meant that we were allowed to stay in our old home for a week after completing on our new build (this is discretionary and depends on the builder), which gave us time to have carpets and flooring fitted and clean up the old house a bit.

We did it a few years ago. As Sugarbum says you do need to be prepared for multiple agents all chasing the commission - of the three ours listed with, one did sod all apart from put a sign up which they'd been explicitly told not to do, one got 1 viewing and the other did 7 viewings in 4 days and sold it by day 5 for well over asking. We'd said all viewings needed to be done by the agents and we would be out of the house for them. All but one were done while we were at work and we gave them a 45 minute slot for the other one and just cleared out one evening.

We haggled on the valuation, in the end we agreed that if it sold for over the asking price before we had to move in we would split the difference with the developer - worked out extremely well for us and the extra covered our stamp duty although this was a few years back so market conditions might make that a less viable option now.

The other thing to watch out for is there was effectively a 'retention' on it to make sure we left it in decent condition - think it was £500. I had to chase to get that back but once I'd spoken to the sales manager we got the money the next day.

It definitely removes the uncertainty aspect of selling, we always say if we moved again the chance to do another part-ex would be a bit plus.