Please help me understand the market!

[Cattenberg]

It’s a crazy sellers’ market in this ordinary, non-touristy West Country town. My own home sold in less than a week and I can’t find a single property available to view, let alone buy.

Is this the same everywhere in the UK, even in London? And are any areas showing signs of calming down again? I don’t know whether to grab a property in a less than ideal area before prices shoot up further or wait this out calmly.

I'm wondering whether the market is as heated in reality as it seems to be when one is offering for properties.

Several properties that have been on my radar have been relisted due to buyers pulling out. I wonder why the agents don't go back to the others who offered first time around.

And today (or maybe earlier but I haven't checked for a week) there are more actual sold prices from Land Registry on Rightmove. So sales completed in January and February. Cross-referencing against Zoopla historic listing, they have all sold for 2-8% less than asking.)

Read this interesting piece in Guardian today. A good explanation of the current housing market. A lot of buyers today would resonate with this.

'Fear of missing out' drives house prices

Rob Gill, MD of the independent mortgage broker, Altura Mortgage Finance, reckons that ‘fear of missing out’ is fueling the UK housing boom.

Gill says:

“There is a deep-seated FOMO in the market right now, a fear among buyers that they could ‘miss out’ if they don’t hurry up and buy before prices spiral beyond reach.

As prices accelerate, it’s certainly tempting to forecast it will all end in tears. However, history suggests that low interest rates, Government support and an improving economy are classic ingredients for house prices to carry on rising rather than crash.”

FOMO is a difficult emotion to handle; in the financial world, it can be risky to pile into a popular, fast-rising asset, especially if everyone else seems to be there already.

I have such bad house FOMO!! The absolute fear that if I don’t buy soon everything will be way out of my reach.

So accurate @DblEspresso

I feel the same @Isittimenow and it's horrible.

We are under offer but there’s nothing coming on at all. We’re looking at family homes in Kent and Hampshire.

Why is no one listing

@Ipanemama I think it’s a bit of a viscous circle! Many people not listing till they’ve found something but they can’t find anything because no one is listing.

there are 2 houses that we were looking at'(first one was very overpriced at £415k and the other needed alot of work but was on for £365k which was still overpriced )...both had been on for over 6 months and neither had gone under offer. they disappeared from the market so we assumed they had sold....but no....2 weeks later both houses are back on the market with different estate agents....for 50k more!!

@Curious2021 I think you’re right. Everything is slowing down and people are unable to move forward. The only stuff left is the tricky to sell/totally overpriced property.

I'm selling a house, people viewed it during my initial meeting with the estate agents. They have offered, so it's not even going to be on Rightmove. That's maybe why not much is being listed publicly?

The redundancies and job losses haven't started yet, that's the worrying part - in construction, companies going into administration were at a record low in 2020, lots of businesses have been propped up by furlough, bounce back loans, grants, defering payments etc. all the pandemic funding will taper off soon and then it could be a very different picture. I think we will start to see the effect by winter.

We didn’t list on Rightmove either and it went to sealed bids. We are registered with agents and in a good position so I think they would let us know if something of interest to us was coming on.

We've noticed a lot of properties selling before they reach rightmove this time round.

We seemed to hear about properties from some agents before they were listed but not all. I'm not really sure what we did which worked for some and not others!

We didn't notice this last time we bought in 2017. Not sure if it was less common then or just because we are in a different price bracket now.

It is absolutely insane at the moment and I think anyone who has been looking to buy for a while will possibly be panic buying due to seeing prices increasing before their eyes and fearing being priced out. This is the situation I'm in. We had an offer accepted last year and the purchase fell through in January due to findings at the end of the conveyancing process. Similar properties are selling now for tens of thousands more than our accepted offer at that time.

We had an offer accepted last week, I believe probably about 20k more than its worth but at this point we are so desperate to move and it's a lovely place in a nice area and not in a chain so we consciously made the decision to pay what we did for the privilege of moving now rather than lose out to another bidding war or waste time on another place where the seller may have to pull out of the purchase. We are very unhappy where we are although in the fortunate position of renting.

Of course those of us doing this are adding fuel to the fire!