Are we being unrealistic about upsizing in the South East?

[BraOffPjsOn]

We’ve got a buyer for our house - dropped a fair amount and then agreed a lower offer as we’d been on a while. All I want is our current 3 bed house with an extra living space and a bigger garden.
I keep looking at houses for another 125k on top of ours selling for 300k but this would be our top budget so for 425k I’d want most things to livable and no huge work.
Every house we view needs a lot of work and is still top budget.

We do live in a lovely part of the SE but I thought we’d be able to upsize fairly easily with our budget.

Is it me not being realistic about the prices, have we sold ours too low or should we just come off the market?

can you compare sold to advertised prices in the area you are looking at? If it’s usually 10% under you could look up to 450, offer quite low and go up to 410

You'll have to give us a rough location (and radius) toegther with your tolerance for "slightly rougher" and whether you need big town/city or are flexible.

I have previously viewed this house ,when it was last on the market, and loved it - except for the garden.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/91525698#/?channel=RES_BUY

I think where exactly you are looking is relevant. Our friends, in the SE, just moved from a small 2 bed to a small 3 bed, and the 3 bed was just under £500k. But they’ve picked a very expensive area even within the wider area where we all live. If they’d gone 20 mins down the road they could have bought a decent four bed and still in a nice area, which is what we did.

We are looking in Bexhill and don’t mind moving out of the west part of it.
We currently have 3 bedrooms, double driveway and a garage,
We would still want 3 bedrooms and parking.

Things do seem to drop but take a long time and seem to not want to accept less and then they have to drop a lot and finally sell.

Our big issue is our buyers want us to find something chain free, which seems to be more expensive and a lot more work to pay for.

I think as an upsizer you should wait and let the price falls work through - if you can. You will then borrow less overall to upsize. It sounds like you have been realistic with your selling price but the properties you want to buy haven't yet understood the market trajectory. This is the case all over rightmove. A handful of properties sell because they are realistic and the rest continue to try and hold on like it was 2022 still. Eventually they will either withdraw or reduce - but its a very slow process. The few that do sell will eventually reset expectations but that takes ages. Can you wait another year to let things unstick ?

The location helps. There do seem to be loads of chain free semi and detached 3 beds with parking within 5 miles of Bexhill for £450K- (looking above your budget and negotiating down).

What is your current square footage?

Sounds like your buyers don’t want to be stuck waiting forever for chains to be completed

Is there an option where you can break the chain - rent / live with family to keep your buyer

I get that they don’t want a long chain, but that’s an unreasonable thing for them to ask of you.

Why don’t they go and find somewhere without a chain!

I live in a not particulaly nice part of SE and you seem to be wanting a lot for you money, even to me.

That said prices are falling (as you know from selling) but lots of sellers aren't being realistic.

They can’t expect you to find somewhere chain free. They either wait or they don’t.

A 3 bedroom semi with a good size garden in my village in the south east would be between £500 - £600k plus. This is outside the M25 but reasonable commuting distance to London.

I agree it's unreasonable but I wonder if they are sceptical that the op actually intends to move and wants evidence that they are committed.

I had this once - a seller that dithered for so long over where to move that we pulled out. A decade on, they are still in that house.

I think you need to be decisive op. If there is truly nothing on the market right now that you feel you can consider within budget, you need to pull your house off the market for the time being, not keep hoping something else will come up.

How would you know what sold prices are - there's a ~2 year delay in anything being published by the land registry, which is unhelpful given the massive economic changes that've happened since.

'20 minutes down the road' by car, can be huge difference in quality of life. Worst case:

• Hundreds of hours of school runs vs. a short walk.
• +20 minutes onto the commute each way for someone catching a train to London, + parking costs.
• A walkable high street with cafe's, pubs and things where all your friends are vs. a car dependent suburb that needs a taxi most of the time if you just want to go out for a drink.

I’m in the SE. We know we can’t upsize at all if we stay here.

On our housing estate our 3bed semi is one of the bigger ones (not big but you know what I mean) and has a garage, drive and garden. The garage and drive are full with our vehicles. Most of the others have a carport one parking space so not the same.

So that only leaves the 4 beds but when you look at them some are not even any bigger just divided the bedrooms differently. Ours is valued at £340-360. the 4 beds £100k more so we are not able to move.

Well yes but I was talking about a situation where it isn’t really that different. That’s why I said OP’s location was very relevant, as “the SE” is pretty big.

Oh and all the villages and the new builds next to us are double our house price. We rented in a village before and when we had to leave we could only afford to buy and move to this estate in town.

We’ve been looking for 6 years now as I’m not coping in a town, we’ve stopped now.

Not everywhere - where we are (West Sussex) a house sale in our road that completed in March this year appeared on the Land Registry in June!

Some sellers are completely delusional when it comes to pricing. A (probate) house we offered on in May 2024 is still on the market and hasn't been reduced at all in that time.

It's so difficult @BraOffPjsOn. We had a similar buyer when we were selling last time - wanting us to break the chain which was impossible in our situation. Fortunately it was very early stages and someone who'd previously offered on ours came back with a better offer so we ditched the other buyer. Unfortunately the days of multiple offers are gone.

thank all for the feedback. It’s reassuring.

We can rent or stay with family - the offer we accepted wasn’t high enough to be worth renting.

We can wait a year or 2 but would like to move for more space.
How long do buyers wait for you to find something else?

Im trying to relax as it’ll be what it’ll be and it is harder when you’re looking for empty houses!