Buying the nicest house on that street?

[erhsla14]

Saw a thread recently about the reverse which got me wondering if there are nay drawbacks to buying the nicest house (or one of the nicest) in that area?

Residential area with mixed houses to include semidetached, terraced and a few detached. Certainly in the next street over there one or two very nice detached (way over budget), the one we've offered for is possibly the nicest on this particular street. Any problems with this when it comes to selling down the line? (other than appreciating the cost of other properties on the street will be lower)

The reason why people say this is because you can often make an ugly house into one of the nicer ones on the street with judicious improvements and additions.
But if you have a posh home and the street or area is not so good, it's not in your control to do anything about the locality, and you're unlikely to recoup your costs as future purchasers with money will generally be looking in a better area.
I don't think there is an issue with buying the nicest house on the street providing it's still in keeping with the general area.

When we were looking to move an estate agent warned us that buying the best house in the street is fine if we plan to live there forever, but it'll never sell for what it's really worth. (Unless there is scope for neighbouring houses to upgrade which would raise the profile of the whole street.)

He referred to it as a house "outgrowing" its area.

Yeah, our house is banging internally but when we sold 99% of the feedback was “what a horrible road”. There was a real ceiling price to the sale too. Whereas crapper, smaller houses on the side streets were soaring in price.

There’s loads of gorgeous houses on Rightmove I’d never buy because you can’t lift the house up and put it on a nice road. But we’re about to view some “meh” houses in lovely areas that make my heart sing, and the aim is plants, paint, improvements, to make them perfect.

There’s an enormous 7 bedroomed, 4500sqft mansion gone up for sale in our town. It’s high spec and a stunning house. It has a huge garden and loads of parking. It looks cheap for the size of the property.

We did a walk by viewing and discovered it’s in the middle of a road with ramshackle old garages and small terraced houses. It’s also adjacent to an electricity substation. The size and quality of accommodation is incongruous to the location. It will very much have a ceiling in terms of house price growth compared to other properties.

There's a gorgeous huge (4,000sqft) listed house on a street in the area I'm looking to buy which was originally put on the market for £1.8m. The rest of the houses on the road, which are 1930's semis, would be valued between £650k-£950k, so this one is a complete outlier.

Having been in the market for several months, big house has recently reduced the price by £200k, and still no takers. The vendors bought it for £700k 15 years ago, so they won't lose out, but the new buyer will have to stay there for a very long time to see the value increase significantly.

Thanks for sharing all your views.

What would you feel about an area where theres a variety of properties - some very nice large detached houses with very expensives cars on the drive, some semi-detached and some terraced (attached via garage) all in the same neighbourhood. In this situation, is buying the "nicest house" in the area more ok?

There’s always go5 to be one nicest house on the street. If it’s yours and all the rest are nice too, just yours is nicer, happy days.

We are in the process of buying what will be the nicest house on the street. It wasn't intentional, it's just that this house has a corner plot and quite a lot of land, and that's what we need to build an annexe for DM. Nothing else like this has come up elsewhere - and we probably wouldn't have been able to afford this amount of land somewhere a bit nicer. The house itself is in quite a lot of disrepair and needs work so it's cheaper than it would be in a good state. As luck happens, the repairs needed fit with where we want to do the building work so even with spending around £120k renovating, I still think the house will be worth more than what we're paying - even taking into account the limits of the area.

Having said that, it doesn't really matter to us because we plan on staying here long term. It wouldn't have been the area we'd have chosen but the street seems nice and quiet and that's all that I really care about. Once the front door is closed and I'm home, I won't see what's around me 🤷‍♀️