Anyone else finding it difficult to sell a larger family home?

[Pickleandwhizz]

Anyone struggling to sell their home, ok we have only been on a month and ive not moved for the last 15yrs. We are trying to downsize, we have a 5 bed detached in its own plot with double garage, brand new kitchen and boiler only fitted few days ago, log burner, its a 1980,s home so all the rooms are large, ive parking for 8 cars. Its was initially on for 425 but we reduced to 410, we are happy to take 395 for it but people who come love it yet they cant afford it, they want it for 375 but if i sold for that we couldnt buy what we want. Estate agents are saying people want something for nothing and its because they cant get a mortgage. Anyone else trying to sell?

Sitting on the market for two years really is just wasting people"s time, buyers spot that and avoid because they think the seller will be "difficult".

If I took seriously the price guidance on RM, I would be selling at about £200k under market value. I'm sure there would be a bidding war on that start point so we would get more. We are not going to play, thanks. I would agree that we need to decide valuation levels again, for 2026.

Sorry, @Thebigonesgetaway I'm sure your house is lovely but I would scroll right past it. It's absolutely not what I want.

Did you quote the wrong person? I don’t live in wales nor is my house for sale. Nor did I post anything suggesting it was my house?

Those three reasons are exactly the same in most places I suspect. It’s the same where I am too. And ultimately they are all price related! Everything else is selling

Hate to break it to all the little stalkers but i never paid 220 for my home so I think you have the wrong property. I live in Wales but no where near that home not even close.

Yes we have a beautiful 5 bed; high spec, new bathrooms, kitchens, spacious, private garden, in a lovely village and it’s been on for 2 weeks and nothing. The market is so dismal!

The market is returning to normality, you just have to drop the price to keep up.

We are unofficially looking for a bigger house, anything we’ve seen on right move in the right areas is massively overpriced and is staying put for ages unless it’s reduced a few times. Still often unaffordable. We are staying in the same area just want to go from a 3 to 4 bed home. The price difference is insane! Comfortably £100k+ more and very few in the market with decent sized bedrooms. More like squeezed a 4 bed into a 3bed sized home. We haven’t put the house on the market yet as so little is coming on I don’t want to sell and be pressured into buying something I don’t actually want!

In truth, no one knows what market value is until you have sold.
The Rightmove price may be way off, especially for a more unusual property. Equally, plenty of agents and sellers are also way off with their asking prices.
You only know once you start getting offers.

Fair enough. Lots of families seem to be making the same decision as the larger properties have become unaffordable relative to incomes and outgoings in many areas. As I've already said, I think there will be more downward pressure on these prices over time, not less.

That was the only one within 20 miles of Cardiff which matched the exact spec you posted (you said you were outside Cardiff). Very unusual to have a modern 5 bed property with parking for 8 cars.

Anyway, wherever it is, prices outside Cardiff are falling in Wales.

Here in Berks. larger houses are moving very slowly. Two near us were on for 6 months and lord knows what sort of price reduction the sellers finally accepted.

Smaller houses (3 beds and under) sell in a week.

And then if the buyer is using a mortgage after the lender"s survey, buyers often make silly offers that they can"t really put up the funds for.

PropertyLog is a good watch for price reductions, there are loads of apps now though that add more detail on areas etc.

Rightmove seem to have the answer. Its because of the world cup 😆. Any excuse they can think of that stops people noticing the elephant in the room.

https://news.sky.com/liveblog-webview/money-live-consumer-personal-finance-tips-sky-news-latest-13040934

Yes, it is just tedious isn"t it, the good news is though it really is slowly starting to unwind.

The one that we found was reduced yesterday to £400K from £410K…

Yes. I saw that. Amazing coincidence that it was reduced just at the point everyone here was saying it was overpriced. What are the chances?

Its certainly patchy - around here larger houses are snapped up quickly (outer London), its flats which are slower to move. People may have less children but more of the big house class work from home than thirty years ago. There is a shortage of accommodation for down sizers which means many would be down sizers are sitting tight - they have no need to move. Incentives to downsize of the type which exist elsewhere could possibly change that - when downsizing leaves you with a net loss why would you move? Its cheaper to fit an adapted bathroom and a lift/stair lift.

There is no shortage of millennials buying large family houses around here. This identitarian analysis of “old people rich, young people poor” has always been nonsense. A sizeable percentage of older people are living in poverty, especially single older women. Their children often struggle to get onto a housing ladder.

The wealthy older group can fund their millennial children’s deposits, have inheritances they can pass straight on as they don’t need them. I’d hazard a guess that most of the millennial families moving in to my road had a sizeable helping hand from those awful old boomers to get on the ladder and will themselves be the wealthy group of the future. Either way, house prices haven’t gone up around here in the last year but they certainly haven’t dropped.

Or the money that should have been invested more wisely will just evaporate as the property Ponzi implodes? Enabling young people to buy overpriced houses with capital isn"t the smartest of moves at this stage.

Reductions are happening all the time, it is almost a "thing" now, 10k barely registers with people though, if you are using the price drop apps there are much bigger price drops than that to catch your attention.

Perhaps but it happens, just as it did in my day. We were competing with people who had large deposits sitting there and waiting courtesy of parents and grandparents or properties bought outright for them and people made the same comments. Historically the long term trend has always been upward. Every decade or so there is a reset and everyone says “that’s the end of rising house prices” and a few years later they are up again.

Consider that the actually well off group is a bigger percentage of the older population than it was when we bought I don’t see the family bank influence disappearing any time soon. Those wild calculations which claim boomers are all millionaires also show millennials set to be even richer. Of course the reality is the top third of both groups do well whilst the bottom third struggle.

The reality is that very few people are actually really well off, many who think they are "well off" are relying on property equity to a large extent, and as that "equity" was mainly the result of very cheap mortgage debt for many years I don"t see the dynamic of endless HPI continuing into the future, what would drive it? A house isn"t like a bank account, the money is only there in the amounts a buyer can offer.

This is true - but the percentage of parents who can help out with massive deposits / bypassing inheritance etc relies on those same parents having made equity gains, not having massive mortgages and not needing the money for retirement. There may be plenty of boomers in that category but perhaps less gen X, and certainly less millennials. Where you live seems to be potentially an exception. Transaction volumes have collapsed - last land registry data for Jan shows around 46000 sales (is there more recent reliable data?). The last time it was below this excluding covid and stamp changes in April last year, was Feb 2011. There are simply less and less people who can afford prices at today's levels and today's interest rates. Also houses staying same in nominal terms is a drop in real terms.