Please help me articulate this point to my stubborn DH!!

[Austereorange]

I need help explaining to my DH that his ‘bright idea’ doesn’t work.

We are on the market and not having much luck. Agent says it might be because the area isn’t as good as it once was (I don’t want to go into why, but let’s run with that). He says if we don’t bottom out our price and get rid quickly we will be stuck. I do also desperately want to move.

He is slightly older than me and therefore only has 10 mortgageable years left. I have 20.

We want to make a considerable leap now, which we can afford to do, out of the area entirely. We want to do this in the stamp duty exemption window.

He says if no one is biting for ours we need to drop our price hugely, get a buyer, get out and do a side step into a (for arguments sake) saleable equivalent house to the one we have now. Then buy upwards. He is proposing this all happens within the next 6 months.

I have pointed out the double moving costs, solicitors, removals, agents etc and he argues that it doesn’t matter - it’s moving us sideways then up.

In my head it makes more sense to drop the price and move, still moving upwards, and ploughing all that duplicate expenditure into the move. 2 lots of costs would be more than the amount we drop the house price by....so that makes no sense whatsoever to me?

Please help me to articulate what a daft idea this is - I can see no merit in it at all - or am I missing something?

Oh good God WHY would he put you through that twice in 6 months, I NEVER want to move again, selling and buying has been the most stressful 3 months of my life!

Have you viewed the two potential houses and do you have any ideas about if either would reduce the price? Or what the size of the chain is for either?

His plan makes 0 sense. Show him this thread.

You must have misunderstood his proposal.

Unless he is mathematically challenged and needlessly anxious the rest of the time too.

@notheragain4 tell me about it. My nerves jangle are the very thought.

@SwedishEdith one has maybe £10k wriggle room and is top end. The other is £30k cheaper and maybe would go another £10k but does need kitchen and carpets but you could live with both for a year.

It’s the transaction costs from buying and selling an extra time vs the risk of taking an extra exposure to property right now
( If you pay down whatever mortgage you have (depends on the t&cs) there would be a lower loan to port later, so mortgage payments would be proportionate. )

Does he actually want this big leap later?
Or does the size of the mortgage you’d have not unreasonably frighten him at his age, with employment and health uncertainty?
Does he really think you’ll be better off moving to a good house but without the “big leap”?

@OneEpisode he is 100% behind the bigger move. Him as much as me if not more so (his whole world is wanting a big greenhouse, watching wildlife/birds and a workshop/garage to tinker in, both now and after retirement. I think half of this weird idea is his urgency to ‘go’ to get there, which is why this doesn’t make sense. So much risk.

I’m going to show him this later he is aware I have asked!

OP We've recently sold our house and moved into rented whilst we found somewhere we want to buy. Our lender will refund our mortgage redemption fee as long as we complete within 6 months of the sale of our old house (which we're on track to do)

I don’t think we need to do this @alohavic70 - we have choices for purchase but just can’t sell! So we are unproceedable.

@alohavic70 yes we are doing this too. We go into rented this week, will pay the fee, but it'll be refunded when we complete on our new house.

So is his argument about the cost of extending your mortgage as opposed to simply porting it? That’s a pretty simple calculation against the costs of two moves and unless your mortgage is through a loan shark I can’t imagine his plan wins. It makes no sense. It’s so illogical I don’t think I’d even be able to discuss it with him. Just reduce the price of your current house and buy the house you want and can afford.

I’d love to know what’s happened to make the area go downhill so rapidly.

Moving twice in 6mths? It’ll be a divorce he gets not a new house!!
TBH if I saw a house dropped by £20k quickly I’d be wondering what’s wrong with it.
Could letting out current house be feasible and still manage purchase of new house?
Would you be brave enough to let MN work
their magic on helping your house sale along?

@Austereorange not much to offer regarding your issue, but I noticed you said you were planning to get your mortgage term based on your age. Last time I got a new mortgage in joint name with DH (about 6 years ago) they would only lend with the term being based on the oldest person (me). This may have changed but it may be worth checking.

@Itscoldouthere that’s all sorted. Based on my wage alone we would be approved (they told us this) but we’ve had all the checks and AIPs done.

I would happily share @SBTLove but a bit twitchy as we are on holiday which I’ve also posted about so I don’t want a link to an empty house. Probably over cautious but anyway!

For context we were told to market at £290, reduced to £280, now £270. We are told people aren’t biting as the area doesn’t warrant £280 and we’d be lucky to get £260. We are looking to buy around the £500k mark. We are told (feedback and asking the agents of the house(s) we want to buy) that it is probably the area and the fact that it is a 3 storey (it isn’t, technically, its split level but has 2 stairs). All these things would have been useful to have been told by our agent to start with.

We had 3 estimates. We went with mid range. We’ve called back the other two to question the sudden drop in expectation and one said ‘we were being generous’ and the other said ‘it’s very hard to value your house as there is no other like it’ (true enough, it’s a one off house on a street of individual houses).

I think we should just drop it to £260 and try. After that I don’t know what!

That’s a big drop! Is your EA marketing it
well? are the photos good? maybe they need to spin the uniqueness of the house.
Some houses we see on here by supposedly professional EAs are presented terribly.
Are you comparable to others for sale nearby?

@Austereorange well that's good to know. Must say it pissed us off at the time as I work PT and DH works FT and earns much more than me, so it was mainly based on his earnings. I think things have changed a bit and you can now get mortgages past age 65 as well.

He's utterly bonkers to want to go through all the stress of selling, buying and moving twice.

There is literally nothing to compare it to. On our road there is a 200 year old listed 6 bedder, 2 bed terraces, 2 new houses being built, a 1960s box and our 15 year old one off 4 bed detached which was built on an empty plot.

We purchased for £200k 6 years ago but it was being marketed for £240k. We got an absolute steal as they were emigrating, needed a fast sale, and we were not in a chain.

The area is very much a ‘borderline’. Our road and the roads in front of us are nice. The roads behind us less so and that’s creeping forwards.

It is time to move it’s just what we have to do to make that happen.

1. I think the stamp duty exemption window only lasts until March 2021. You may not be able to achieve the second purchase by that time.
2. Stupid idea

If I was buying a house that the current owners had owned less than six months I would assume there was something wrong with it- I ALWAYS check how long someone has owned a house for for this very reason. Also, I believe there are some complications with banks/land registry if you're selling a house after less than six months, probably money laundering as a PP has mentioned. A spate of house moves in a short period of time won't do your credit rating any favours either. Finally, the average house sale takes 3-4 months, meaning you'll miss the stamp duty holiday on the second purchase. Why not just drop the price by the amount of stamp duty you'd save? Huge drops in price can make potential purchasers very nervous as they assume there is something wrong with the house... Its a funny time, where I live some houses are under offer very quickly and others I honestly can't understand why they haven't been snapped up. There's also a lot of property going on the market because of pent up demand. Are your pictures up to scratch? In a market that has lots of activity you'll need to stand out from the crowd. We paid a few hundred quid to get our pictures taken by a professional property photographer, honestly it made a huge difference.