Venting space: Overpriced properties!

[mummabubs]

Feel like I'm posting so much on this board atm! 😂 Just needed a rant.

We had a viewing this morning on a property that we've been really looking forward to seeing. It's been on the market a few months now and they've had no offers yet. It's a semi-detached cottage in a lovely village where property rarely comes up, so we knew before viewing that it's the kind of property where you're buying a lifestyle as much as a property. We also knew there was work to be done in terms of updating etc. The downstairs was lovely, on the smaller side but nice cosy cottage-y feel and the location is great. However...

It's listed as a 4 bedroom house, with 2 doubles, one single and an attic room (the current owners got rid of a bedroom to put stairs in to go up to the attic room). All fine, as we have 1 child, another on the way and have family that visit so as long as we had a 3 bedder and any room in the house that a sofa bed can go in then all's good. Reality: The two doubles are fine. The "single" room literally cannot fit a bed in there as there's floorspace taken out by the stairs. I'm not even sure it would fit a cot! This wasn't a dealbreaker as we'd planned on utilising the attic room of needed. However, the stairs are the thinnest and steepest things I've ever seen (smaller than the length of my feet so had to go up sidewards), there's no heating up there and the roof is so low that you literally can't stand up anywhere in the room, even in the centre. The current owners paid £320,000 for it 4 years ago, they've made no aesthetic changes or improvements and the only structural thing they've done in that time is lose one of the bedrooms (which was a perfectly viable single room!) to put the dangerous stairs in to the unusable attic room. So it's realistically a 2 bedroom cottage. They've listed it at £465,000 (😱), so a 40% hike when if anything we feel they've devalued it in terms of bedrooms.

The things we've seen today are fixable over time and with some imagination (& money!) but we've left just feeling a bit deflated that there's many things about the house that excite us, but at that price point it's just ludicrous when we'd probably need to spend £50k+ to make it what we want and at that price we'd never make it back. So just feel irked at both the agent and vendors for putting such a ridiculous value on a house that has half the usable bedrooms that they've advertised. We don't mind a bit of a project and are willing to make an offer at the £390,000 mark but know deep down they're very likely to just reject it. The agent has said there is wiggle room on the price but we'd be offering more of a landslide reduction in their book! It's a house with a lot of potential but the excitement just goes when we match what we've seen with the price they've decided to ask for.

Sorry, rant done! It just annoys me- be truthful about what you're offering and make sure the price reflects that!!! Please make me feel better with stories of properties you've viewed which have made you laugh inside at the cheekiness of what's really on offer vs. the listing!

@fitzbilly

We emailed a new house on the market today. Advertised as four bed, but on closer inspection the third bedroom is downstairs in what I would call the utility room (it even has a sink in it) and the fourth bedroom was a box room. That is not a four bed family home. £550k.

I'm hoping the stamp duty holiday doesn't get extended so prices go back to normal.

It’s been extended until end of June but at the end of June it’ll just be extended again! Absolutely ridiculous!

@Branleuse

its an absolute pain in the neck isnt it. Ive given up on listings that dont have a floorplan, and the amount of properties that are listed as 4 bedrooms when theyre actually 2 or 3 bedrooms, but theyve decided noone needs reception rooms

Yup. I've just been emailed the details for a lovely-sounding 3-bed house. Until you look at the photos properly and realise that it's only 3 beds if you don't actually want a sitting room... And still priced a good £30k above what actual 3-bedders go for in the area!

@2bazookas

Surely you look at the brochure photos AND floor plan/room measurements, before you make an appointment to view?

We did, we aren't completely daft ☺️ Loft bedroom wasn't photographed and the floor space size was given, not the ceiling height. With the tiny room they left the bulkhead out of the photo and room measurement/ description.

I am so with you @mklanch.

In any event, vendors have said they're willing to budge down to £450k 😂😂😂 so we've said we wouldn't be offering anywhere near that and are not going to submit an offer.

We aren't completely opposed to renting and then looking, but as we have one child, I'm nearly 30 weeks pregnant and we have a dog it's not the easiest ask... Especially as the rental market here is even more dead than the sales market!! 🤦🏻‍♀️

I’ve just sent a semi derelict cottage in mid wales with quite a lot of Japanese knotweed sell for £385,000. The guide price was £80,000. There is a lot of demand and low housing stock.

Did you bring up the layout discrepancies? You should. If no one does they'll just carry on marketing it at too high a price, whereas if every viewer said "nah mate, that's not a four bed - you're having a laugh" they'll surely have to take notice - how can they not?!
Your Op is perfect, you should copy and paste most of it into an email.

@kooked they've found a property they want in the Gower (which is another very expensive area) so my guess is that they're going to stick rigidly to their massively overpriced figure so as to make that move achievable. Which is fine, good luck to them finding someone who's willing to pay what they're looking for, we aren't the buyers for them!

@springdale1

I’ve just sent a semi derelict cottage in mid wales with quite a lot of Japanese knotweed sell for £385,000. The guide price was £80,000. There is a lot of demand and low housing stock.

It's just all a bit mad isn't it. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Sounds like they have done a DIY job of a loft conversion.
I viewed a property with similar done to it and despite its incredible character and location, it just didn't sell. Eventually the vendor pulled it off the market. Such a huge shame!

I really wish we had the European/USA/probably rest of the world’s model of advertising a house via its square foot. In France a lot of agents also give you the square meters of the plot.

I feel your pain OP. The fact is they might sell it, if it really is such a lovely, sought-after location as you describe. A couple might come along who want a nice home office for one of them, a craft or hobby room for the other, and just the one spare bedroom. They might be lucky. But that is a very, very small market!

Good luck with your search

[quote mummabubs]@fitzbilly oh my gosh that's absolutely another pet property peeve of mine - listing downstairs reception rooms as additional bedrooms!! [/quote]
This drives me mad too.

"Four bed family home"

Erm, no. That's a 3 bed home with a bed in a room where a dining table should be

It just all feels a bit deflating at the moment. We paid £225k for our 3 double bed townhouse 7 years ago, now due to the crazy price hikes despite our new budget of £450k that literally just buys us the same amount of space (or less!) somewhere else 🤦🏻‍♀️ We do need to move as we need an extra room really but it feels so depressing to potentially spend double what we paid for here to get the equivalent of what we already have.

Absolutely. Another one is trying to convince you that a 2m x 1.8m rectangle constitutes a bedroom. Nope, that's a slightly oversized shoe cupboard.

Sorry, post above should have quoted you @FlumpetCrumpet!

@mummabubs

It just all feels a bit deflating at the moment. We paid £225k for our 3 double bed townhouse 7 years ago, now due to the crazy price hikes despite our new budget of £450k that literally just buys us the same amount of space (or less!) somewhere else 🤦🏻‍♀️ We do need to move as we need an extra room really but it feels so depressing to potentially spend double what we paid for here to get the equivalent of what we already have.

We moved from Scotland to south east England twenty years ago. Now that’s a shock to the system, there was literally nothing on the market for double the price our three bed semi sold for. Literally nothing. Not even a one bedroom student flat, there was not one property at twice the price.

So buying the same amount of space in a more expensive location is a bit of a result. Try no space for the same price. Literally none.😱

Are you saying your place has gone up from £225 to £450k? I wouldn't find it that surprising that you get a similar amount of space for the same price As yours has gone up in value, so has everyone else's.

I have a viewing booked for Wednesday the house is actually reasonably priced, which is rare at the moment. So there is either a nasty surprise lurking, or if not, it will end in a crazy bidding war and I will be priced out. I am beginning to wonder why I’m bothering to view.

With all this house price craziness I do wonder why the government are propping the market up? If I had the luxury of time I would wait but we are renting a cramped overpriced flat, far from ideal.

@IndecentFeminist

Are you saying your place has gone up from £225 to £450k? I wouldn't find it that surprising that you get a similar amount of space for the same price As yours has gone up in value, so has everyone else's.

Haha I wish! No, we've accepted £270k on our property (it's a terraced newbuild so not much scope to dramatically increase in value really). Since we bought here we've both got better paid jobs, that's the only reason our budget has increased.

I'd make the low offer on the house; just clearly state your reasons for doing so (the 'loft conversion' sound very dodgy btw - if that was done in the last few years but you can barely walk up the stairs, can't stand up & no heating, it's very unlikely it has had proper sign-off so should not be priced as being an attic)

We had this with a few houses we looked at in London. Our budget was £1m (mainly debt ) which we thought was very healthy and would be enough for a 4 bedroom house in our grotty area of south London. Except every 4 bed that came up in our budget had something majorly wrong with it. A teeny tiny paved yard instead of a garden. A fourth bedroom that was up a ladder with such a low ceiling you'd have to sleep flat on the floor, no bed. A sitting room with a whacking great Victorian coal burner the size of a phone box in the corner.

We've given up now and are moving out of London