Hi All,
Writing here in frustration, 5 months into trying to sell our one-bed flat in a desirable estate, fed up with the estate agents' crap advice.
Here's the flat: www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-86505251.html
Thoughts welcome.
We bought it in 2014, and it's been a long and painful process. Basically my mother had some money that she wanted to invest in property, but didn't want to get a mortgage in her name, so I sort of got railroaded into taking on the mortgage, and the idea was that we would split the equity between us.
Don't even enter into business with your parents, people. Although we originally agreed it was an investment, my parents signed me into a deal that said that all three of us had to agree to sell it. Which ultimately meant that my parents vetoed anything I said. In 2016 the area was literally a named property hotspot in London, and the prices went up astronomically, but my mum didn't want to sell. Eventually, because my boyfriend also wasn't allowed to move in, we moved out of London to rent, while my brother moved into the flat, but I couldn't buy another place because the mortgage was in my name and I couldn't sell, so I'm still renting now.
Brexit happened amidst all of this, and then my mum unexpectedly got cancer, and long story short, within a year she died from a very rare reaction to the chemo treatment :(. I know I moan about it above, but I miss her a lot and am so annoyed that this situation made our last few years quite difficult and led to a lot of disagreements.
Obviously with the family reeling from what happened in October 2018, we couldn't think about selling for another while after that, but we all agreed by August 2019 to put it on the market. And since then, like, zilch.
We chose a crap estate agent who, despite only managing to get one viewing at a time that was supposedly quite busy, did manage to get us an offer from an investor that seemed to be a personal friend of theirs, but then after 8 weeks of our solicitors dealing with them they said they had to change solicitors and start the process again. When we got annoyed about this the estate agents stupidly put the flat back on the market, and then the buyers pulled out. We changed agents, and they've only managed to get us a handful of viewings since November (yeah, I know, it's a quiet time of year, but plenty of other places are selling).
My mum chose the flat and she was pretty good at choosing places that were desirable. It's in a nice estate, and apparently the 2 beds are selling like hotcakes but no one wants the one beds. It doesn't make sense to me at all - we've already dropped our price and it is substantially (more than 10%) lower than its peak price in 2016, but we keep getting told that we have to cut it more if we want people to even bother coming to view it! It doesn't make sense to me, as it's a nice flat, in a nice area, and surely there are some people who want 1 bed flats and can't afford 2 beds. Surely there is always a market for 1 beds for people who just want to get onto the housing ladder.
Very very frustrating, sorry for the rant, but some insight from anyone would be great - what the markets are like in your areas, what you know about selling one beds, etc.
Thanks!
K