Would you buy a house with no vehicular access?

[Jampot]

pedestrian/cycle access along a path wide enough for emergency vehicles though just not allowing cars? The house would be brand new in nice garden

would it have parking?

How well is it served with public transport? And how able-bodied/mobile are you and your family (I do not mean to be offensive in any way but if you have, say, 3 under 5s or anyone in the family who uses a wheelchair, it's different to being all vigorously mobile with access to a regular bus service). Basically if you need to own a car, it's probably not the best place to live.

it wouldnt have parking, that would have to be on the road. Basically there's a building plot with planning permission for a 3 bed dormer bungalow up for grabs but its at the rear of someone's very long garden. Will probably be about 180ft from roadside. The area is well served with buses and trains and shops etc and the plot is in teh heart of the village

are you proposing to live on it, or to try to sell it? i mean; do you want to try to guage how sellable it is, or to decide if its for you?

it sounds quite nice to me... i wouldnt rule out living there... but madamez makes good points re accessibility.

we're going into rented but i dont want to totally leave the housing market so i was contemplating finding a piece of land and building something to sell on as a bit of a project really so I was just trying to guage how saleable it might/might not be

i guess anything will sell for the right price though eh?

Go for it, Jampot. There are changes afoot with regard to the old internal combustion engine, and if the area is already well-served, I would say it was an investment.

this would also be close enough to project manage as opposed to another piece of land with no planning but in a conventional position about 25 miles away

Well Iwould be happy in a house that has no car access but is near good public transport, as I am car free. And there are quite a few of us about

thanks for your opinions then ladies

i'll let you know what i do

Yes, I'm a member of the car-free club

Dagnabbit, but they make a place look untidy.

Good luck with what you decide. The answer to your question from me is -- no. I would not just be thinking about my own transport but bin access (walking 150 metres with bin bags every week). service access, you know, the washing machine man and so on, delivery access plus saleability. There is no doubt it would be more difficult to sell. You must have discussed this with estate agents, no? Whatever you go for I hope it's successful, sounds like a big project.

yes i have discussed the saleability of it with an agent stuffitllama . They seem to think that whilst there will be a more limited market available they sell properties with no parking quite easily. I suppose there must be some roads (esp in London or other city areas) where you have to fight for a space close to your house anyway and could well find yourself walking with shopping etc.

Another option i could explore would be to locate the owner (possibly Council) of the pathway and request a limited vehicular access to the property in exchange for adopting/maintaining the portion from the roads edge to the property. There would be no need for other cars to drive down there as they would have nowhere to go

Good I hope it goes well. Second option sounds like a good idea. My only reservation was that when the market is well off for properties and you need the equity to be quite "liquid" it might be an issue. But you sound like you're right on top of the issues anyway.

I think there is a difference between properties with no parking and ones that you are forced to walk a minimum of 180ft to access. My home has no parking space but I can leave the car outside on the kerb.

In the countryside especially, I do think it makes a difference because people are used to larger plots with off-street parking. I don't use my car a lot - I live in London - but I can't imagine I would relish herding my small children up a track in the rain while carrying the week's supermarket shopping with me.

I would definitely try to negotiate car access otherwise I think a lot of people would be very put off. People are looking for reasons not to buy at the moment - if you are doing this soleley for profit, then you have to work hard to give them as few negatives as possible.

Have you sold your house now?

How are you going to get your shopping home? Your children to the car? Etc

I live in a flat with no garage (we rent a parking space across the (very busy) road outside our house), and this means, de facto, that shopping either has to be delivered or done on foot and wheeled home in a pushchair or shopping trolley. This is fine here in Paris because most people live in similar circumstances and there is plenty of provision for shopping in this way. We also have public transport (bus) right outside the front door.

absolutely not

Jampot -have you considered how the lack of vehicular access will affect building costs?

If vehicles can't get access easily for delivery of building materials etc it will significantly increase the costs as extra manpower will be needed to shift it from the roadside to the plot.

I have some experience of this as our garage/driveway parking is about 20m from the house and the road is a further 20m away. Its an old house that we're renovating (DP is a builder) so theres a lot of extras to consider when we get sand/gravel/bricks etc delivered.

PS - On a positive though its great not having to hear cars coming and going right outside your house, especially on these cold mornings where people leave engines running and are scraping ice off windscreens. Its also safer for little ones being that much further from the road.

Actually looking at my last post I think the distances here are more than 20m and 20m (I'm crap at guessing at these things)

No , if the road is anything like ours parkign quickly becomes a nightmare due to absence of offroad parking. Also lugging shopping, babes in arms etc that distance wodul put me off and probably limit your market to resell. In fact 4 have been built in our village simiarly, behind a house on the High Street and actually with some adjacent space to park, but only one has sold in 6 months.

Excellent point Betty - how many people needed to carry a set of roof trusses up an unmade track? Eek.

Also, I imagine that the track is unlit and not much fun to walk down at night...

Trying not to become obsessive about this but can't help thinking of problems. In current climate, are you sure risky, speculative project is worth the effort - most smart money seems to be leaving property market, not investing in it.

Message withdrawn

Get yourself a donkey.