Taking our house off the market. It’s too annoying.

[sellotape12]

I’m fed up of having to leave the house every Friday and Saturday, or estate agents turning up early. Or then being super loud and waking the baby from his nap. I’m fed up of having to frantically tidy with five mins notice. This whole process has made me re-fall in love with our existing house.

FYI we live in a pretty popular neighbourhood of London and have a modernised mid terrace. We’ve had 41 viewings, no offers, all feedback has been “we’re thinking about it”. Everything we look at to buy as onwards is being price-pumped to try offset the falling market. Or it looks ok then you realise it needs some renovation work and with 2 year waitlists and spiralling costs, it’s no longer a good deal to renovate.

The reason we wanted to move was a busy street but tbh the volatility of this market and lack of options has made us realise our current place has more of good thing about it. So solidarity with anyone else who’s thinking of coming off the market!

The agent is doing well at getting viewings. But not at converting. That may not be to do with a spiel, but because, perhaps, they don’t allow much time for viewings and push people through; or they don’t show the whole house (we had an EA completely forget that there was a garage because it was at the back of the house); or they can’t answer questions about the house and don’t bother to go back to the vendor to get the answer; or they agree with the viewer’s negative comments. There are lots of ways to be a bad salesperson, and EAs haven’t had to work very hard at selling over the past few years.

They might also put people off making low offers. We had that once when viewing a house we really liked but which needed a lot of work doing to it. We were told unequivocally that the vendors would not accept anything in the region that we were considering so we didn’t bother. They sold it a year later for less than we would have offered. It was a different market then, but still …

Good decision @sellotape12 . I'm still traumatised by our move 26 years ago.

Surely they would have known that from the photographs?!?
Same with north facing garden etc…

Why going to have a look at something that you know will be unsuitable for you 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

'Why is their kitchen wood?'
Because it's more hardwearing than most other surfaces, has warmth, detailing, and depth to the finish, can be refinished fairly easily, and doesn't look like 1970s formica in 2010's grey. And was it wood on the photos? the photos you should have bothered to look at before wasting our time booking a viewing? Ah yes, I see it was.

'Their garden is north facing'...no surprise to anyone competent enough to use Goggle Earth and/or unfold and read a map.

'They haven't done the loft' If 'they' had done the loft, it really would say so on the details. Learn to read.

People who can't be arsed to do even the most basic checking before they visit ought not to waste Vendors' time booking viewings.

I completely understand this

tbh if you don't need to sell, I really wouldn't right now. Voice of bitter experience.

It was obvious when we sold our house the amount of parking. Garage, plus two off road spaces, not to mention on road parking. The most common feedback we had was ‘not enough parking’ 😩

I went through this with a house once!!

The comments from buyers were odd (made me think EAs brought viewers in without them seeing the listing first); and every alternative property I saw made me love our original house more. I’d get home from viewings and be relieved to be back.

I still think so fondly of that little house. We no longer own it, but I know exactly what you mean. We took it off the market and re-listed a year or two later when we were bursting out of it.

Everyone has skipped over it but you said yourself why this is happening. Your road is busier than you like, which is why you’re selling. That also tells me it’s not a particularly attractive road.

In my experience, such a high number of viewings without offer is always a problem with the road, or local area. Always. And people can’t appreciate that until they’re there.

"We’ve had 41 viewings, no offers"

Means it's too expensive.
If it was priced reasonably you would have had more than one offer after 41 viewings. You wouldn't have even made it to that many viewings.

"In my experience, such a high number of viewings without offer is always a problem with the road, or local area. Always."

And by extension that means the actual problem is the price. It's overpriced when you factor in the busy road.

But that's ok as you've fallen back in love with it, so you don't have to put yourself through 41 more viewings for nothing.

I'm glad your now happy to stay - I also hated the viewings.

I can't see any reference to if the EA vetted people before viewings - did they have decisions in principle for mortgage, proof of deposit / Stamp, proof of current property under offer if relevant, etc?

Unless desperate to move due to certain circumstances- I'd insist on robust vetting, as experience timewasters on previous property totally peeved me off. Who wants to prep for timewasters.

@BraveToaster Obviously, market conditions do differ from place to place, but the London market although showing very slow growth isn’t actually falling back. Which means that listing prices still seem high and those without real motivation to move: death, divorce, downsize, many are choosing to stay put. Previously there would have been an equity grab that would have made a move feel more than worthwhile, but as you say, with such a lot of monthly payments being gobbled up in interest. However, all the agents who recently valued our home, told us our house value had increased by 300k + following a key renovation project, so there is definitely still room to staircase the market using this technique, but the costs of renovations too has increased, which means the barriers overall to property ownership are being made higher. Ultimately when the market is a bit shaky there will always be folks who capitalise on those conditions to get a good deal, essentially going shopping in a sale, if you don’t HAVE or need to accept an offer, there’s no reason to be part of the sale. Like many others, despite our house rising by 300k since 2019, since we need 250k to get another bedroom, and likely a minimum of 150k to renovate whatever we buy, this leaves us potentially short of the latter and we have concluded that 4 bedrooms may have to do us for the time being.

I feel similar. The market is in the gutter although I don’t feel like this time of year is a good time to sell anyway.
We wanted to build our own place which would have made things slightly less stressful, but the aholes, despite legislation in place which our build met, have decided nah.
having said that we’ve only had one viewing despite supposedly hundreds of daily clicks on our property. Frankly I just want to leave this stupid country!

If it's hundreds of daily clicks you might want to check if it's been shared on Reddit. Sometimes it's for positive reasons, sometimes it's not positive at all. The subreddit is called spotted on Rightmove.

Yep- if it's a busy or main road then price comes into it- rather than a leafy side road etc.

It doesn't bother some people but if there's little difference in price between it and quieter side roads- those streets will tend to get the sales

Lol we sold our flat in Clapham and had lots of bizzare comments like that. One said they could not bear the fact that there was a creaking floorboard in the hall. The estate agents said that young people are really fussy right now as a) their parents are buying for them in cash so they have no concept of value or what it's realist to actually buy b) they live at home so have no concept of mininmal discomfort or things needing done and don't need to move 3) prices are falling in south london so there's not much heat in the market. We had to reduce the price (that was over a year ago).

Don't move if you don't need to. It's awful with young kids. You are Totally right not to move.

I think in general new set of buyers standards are different. We don’t have equity to play with and homes we’re buying in London starts with 500k. So if you think about it, we do get quite picky in making a purchase for half million and up. If your home doesn’t have necessities such as sound and proper flooring, can you really complain if someone says, nah I won’t pay 500k and live with creaking floors. Especially that we don’t need to buy at all, and can just sit on our pot of money, invest it for retirement. It is sellers nowadays that have most of their money locked up in equity, which is much less liquid and hard to access, unless you find someone to buy it.

You'd be hard pressed to find any viewings if you start making demands for AIPs or prove of funds to just book in the viewing. No way am I sharing my financials and account information with random EA lol

The thing that used to drive me mad was “oh there’s not a proper garden”. (I had a patio). READ THE BLOODY DETAILS - There’s measurements and photos!

I've had similar comments in the past, & I've always said to the accompanying EA "Is this not in your description" Do these arseholes pratts wankers clients not know the garden faces north, or whatever ?
Cuts down the time-wasters when the EAs amend the details.

I would take it off the market now and enjoy the Christmas season in your home. When we were selling our house I stopped viewings over Christmas as I had just had enough of the constant tidying and getting small children out of the house and not getting any offers. You can always relist in Jan which is what we did.

@sellotape12
41 viewings would persuade me to appreciate the current home. Are some of them second viewings? One viewer on mine asked for a second visit and asked to see the loft space, so I left the stepladders out, but she didn't bother going up to the loft. Also experienced viewers who made ridiculously low offers, when houses in this area were generally a fixed "going rate", and think some of them didn't have the funds to buy at the going rate, which was annoying as I had to prove affordability for my next home at the viewing stage.

I’m taking my house off tomorrow as fed up with the process. Had to put up with silly feedback from ‘ftb here, will you accept for your 3 bed renovated semi the same price as a for a two bed terrace on the same road, to idiocies like ‘the gas meter isn’t new’ .
Been on since August, had half a dozen views and offers that don’t even cover the renovation costs, never mind give me a small uplift of 5%. The price takes into account the current market and is a good chunk down on last year.
I don’t need to move, I would just like a new project. I’ll put it back on in two or three months.