Buying in an area that you don't live in...

[OfUselessBooks]

We're looking to buy a house about 100 miles from where we currently live, and I'm worried about the logistics.

Our house is about to go on the market. I'm hoping it will sell reasonably quickly. I'm keeping an eye on Right Move in our new area, but should I be registering with estate agents too? I don't think we can really start looking and viewing until we have an offer on ours as we need the proceeds to buy our new one.

I'm worried the pressure will be on then to find one. We can travel up to the new place about 3 times per month and stay with family there. Has anyone done this - should we be able to line up multiple viewings over the 3 days we can stay there? I'm quite anxious about the whole process, especially at the moment.

We’ve always sold first, moved in to rental in new area which gave us time to look properly. Is that an option for you?

Rent first if you possibly can, ideally for 12 months. We relocated across the country five years ago and would have made an expensive mistake if we hadn't rented here first.

We can't afford to rent unfortunately as neither of us will have jobs (we will be buying a house outright with the proceeds of our current house, and using my redundancy payment to live off until we find work). We could feasibly move in 2with family, although I'd be a little worried about house prices going up and not being able to afford one at a later date. We both grew up in the town so know the area very well. X

We did this - moved 150 miles and bought a new house without living in the area. It was before Rightmove, but ringing estate agents and saying 'we will be in the area on the xth and want to see as many properties as possible that meet our criteria then' worked really well. We saw a few places that weren't on the market yet, and it did concentrate their minds in arranging viewings

I'm moving 350 plus miles and can't go anywhere yet as I couldn't get my dog into kennels :( I found the Phil 'Moveiq' website today and it's full of really useful info, viewing forms etc. You'll find it at moveiq.co.uk. He has a little video where he gives 5 points - do your research and narrow down your location (you can do work to a house, but you can't move it), settle on your best budget, make a list of must haves and nice to haves, and register with the portals as well as the estate agents in the area you choose. I've been looking for weeks and it's really helped me focus. Good luck :)

Sorry I forgot - his last point was to be nice, and the estate agents will remember you when a gem comes in :)

We moved away from the town in which we sold. We're both managers and we approached this task in a way you would interviewing for new staff. These are our tips:

Commit yourselves to looking on line most weekday evenings and making bookings.

Book Fridays off if you can, and book up to 8 viewings a day each Friday and Saturday, staying over Friday nights.

Sounds like an awful schedule but it really doesn't take long to look at most houses if you have a list of your priorities. Say you have ten priorities, then as soon as you notice a house has missed 3 of them move on, you can always come back to it.

Before you leave every property on the back of each of those handouts you get with a property quickly note your initial thoughts and what it had and didn't in terms of your priorities.

At the end of each day we'd then stop at a cafe or restaurant as a treat but also to review the houses and notes we'd made.

When you're looking at a lot of houses it can be anxiety provoking not to be able to remember something, so the definite "no's" went into a folder that we held on to until we ended our search, just in case.

I learned to discount really quickly. It took us only 4 weekends to find our home. The funniest thing is that the house we chose met all of our priorities but was so dull we'd forgotten all about it! We booked in a second visit (we'd only done this with one or two other houses) and realised that we had actually found the perfect house!