Going to view a house today that I want badly !

[skidamarinkadinka]

Gorgeous 1930s detached house, needs alot of modernising, huge garden, big drive and garage. It's on a main road into town but all the houses on this road are the same and just so lovely to look at.
We are not on the market yet but plan to get the same estate agents to list us asap. We need to move, we've outgrew this house in the last two years.
They want £450k. It was reduced in October.
Feedback has been the main road putting people off and also the work that will need doing.
How can we up our chances ?
We can probably go upto £430k but that would be the maximum.

Beautiful house.

So happy for you, OP, huge congrats, amazing patience, what a slog, well done.

Yay!
I'm sure I've mentioned this before but I will never understand the UK real estate system. Where I live if you've got the money /mortgage then you buy the house. That's it. The whole "chain" thing seems so odd. And anyone can turn up to a viewing, you just have to give your name and a phone number. About a quarter of houses are sold by auction - but that's mainly the super fancypants houses or on the other hand bank mortgagee defaults. The majority are private treaty , usually "offers over" or a "price guide" - that is always way low.
Do you not have open houses? Where there is just a few REA's standing around in relatively smart suits, one greeting people and taking names and numbers, one or 2 wandering around the house answering questions and just keeping an eye out. Do you have to be pre-approved just to go to an open house? Some of our neighbours would have nothing to do on a Saturday!😂

So here’s the story - the house was unregistered, vendors solicitors didn’t find this out until about 8 weeks in because that’s how long it took them to get the draft contracts together 🤦‍♀️ then it was found out the original deeds were lost, lots of arguing back and forth between vendors and their solicitors about who had the deeds, anyway, finally it gets registered but this takes us to September! We put the offer in the beginning of April. We had to break the chain and move into a (horrible) flat or we were going to lose our buyers who had been really patient so far.
After all this our solicitors then decided to start being shit and dragging their feet, so I had to put a formal complaint in to get things moving, it was only a couple of weeks ago we thought we were going to lose the mortgage offer due to it expiring, it all seemed to happen really fast at the end

Omg how stressful!

Absolutely my kind of home. Beautiful! Enjoy!

It really was, I had a wobble half way through and started looking at other houses, but I needed to see the house again, so we did and that confirmed it was still the one

Are you thinking of reopening the fireplace?

Don’t most people have to sell their current house to be able to afford the next one?

Yes, but you do that. A lot of people sell first, and then look for another place. Some people move in with parents for the 4-6 week gap if there is one ( hands up there) or rent an air bnb or crash with mates. Settlement is 6 weeks, if both parties agree you can make it longer or shorter. Most people organise exchange on the same day if possible. There's also bridging finance. I don't know a single person who has had a problem. We don't have chains. That seems such an excruciatingly awkward way to do it. Sp person A is hoping that person H gets their finance? It's just odd. I don't know another country that does it but maybe there is one?

Fair enough that actually makes a lot of sense! Except for the I guess having to move house twice in six weeks

We need to do something with it as it’s bloody ugly atm 😆