Owning your own home

@Howard
There is nothing that ties you into any offer.

I think making multiple offers is reasonable, particularly if both are made as ones you'd possibly complete on.

Personally I would use it as leverage on the more expensive one.

ah, thanks for the info. i hope your new neighbours are more neighbourly.

we are reasonably happy where we are, just off the Bakers Arms end of Hoe St. I do have a bit of a long term plan to move to Leytonstone, but it's unlikely to happen any time soon.

We’ve just bought and moved into a place in Northfields. After spending what feels like an eternity looking for somewhere, making offers, and being lied too, I can confirm the estate agents here are as reptilian as any other part of London.

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Theres an entire 1 bed apartment in there!

Have you brought a medieval castle?

Nah it’s an old gardeners cottage who would’ve worked on the Forest estate, I think. It’s weird I wouldn’t have picked this place if you’d described it to me as I was fairly set on a certain type of place. But something about it just took hold of us. I’m happy we went for it at this point (luckily!!)

Looked like this before.

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After spending what feels like an eternity looking for somewhere, making offers, and being lied too, I can confirm the estate agents here are as reptilian as any other part of London

Oh do tell. What happened?

We have friends who just bought there, sounded reasonably painless.

Just the usual shenanigans.

We had gazumping. A lot of “we’ve had an offer 5K under asking, and if you offer the asking price we’re certain you’ll get it”. Discrepancies between EA and seller stories regarding PP and building regs. General poor/slow/protracted communications. There’s plenty more, but we have been looking since we moved back to the UK a few years ago. They weren’t all like this, but I’d say over half were.

The EA branch manager for place we eventually bought was a thoroughly obnoxious prat who behaved like he was negotiating on the apprentice. In fairness the rest of the staff we’re nice, and the manager had “moved on” by the time things got going again two months ago.

TBH I was expecting this hassle. However, it doesn’t happen where my wife is from, so having to explain all this agro and seeing her disappointed many times over made it all more stressful than it should be.

Cheers.

Had a weird one yesterday where we viewed a Edwardian terrace and in an otherwise well presented house they had pulled all the doors off and replaced them with flat unfinished fire doors. I asked why the fuck they would have done that because it looked like vandalism in such a well turned out place, and the EA couldn't really explain it. Wondered if it was because the place was tenanted at some point. Can't see the reason for it in any other scenario but I'm sure someone on here knows better than me.

It's been an HMO would be my guess, and afterward they looked at the cost of nice doors and had to have a sit down for a little while.

Had they had any major work done?

When I had my loft conversion done the choice was to fit a hard wired smoke alarm in every single room in the flat or replace the old doors with fire doors.

We put our 1 bed house in Camberwell on the market last Thursday eve at what I believe to be a pretty keen price (25k lower than what an identical house sold for in February). In the past year we’ve had the house rewired with a new consumer unit, totally revamped our garden, and last week had the whole interior of the house painted. It is the closest thing to a turn key property I’ve ever seen.

There have been 8 viewings so far, and 1 each of the next 3 days. One person has said they planned to make an offer (although that’s coming up on a week ago now), and one had a handful of questions.

What I find funniest is that 2 viewers have said the house is too small. What does one expect of a 1 bed freehold house for 375k in Camberwell?

Looks awesome!

What I find funniest is that 2 viewers have said the house is too small. What does one expect of a 1 bed freehold house for 375k in Camberwell?

Then again, some places more spacious for the given sqft than others.

I sold my house last year which was on the sliproad to the A102. Plenty of people said it was too noisy. Yep - because where else do you get a 3 bed house in SE10 for <500k unless it's on a shit road.
Had about 30 viewings in the first fortnight. Almost everyone said too noisy, the other two made offers.

It'll just be people figuring out what they want for their money and whether location beats size, and the only way to do that is to view some places.

Sounds like the stamp duty holiday isn't papering over the cracks in the property market then.

Yeah I guess you don’t know what your parameters are til you view a few places. Admittedly when we were buying the place it was very much, a. what can we afford, and b. what properties will the bank lend us money against.

We ended up with a small freehold house with a garden and designated parking on the best road (IMO) in London; Camberwell grove.

Hopefully there is a carbon copy of us now in the market for the same now ha ha ha

We repeatedly had people viewing the flat and then saying the kitchen was too small. Obviously it was on the floorplan but I think plenty of people aren't really able to translate that into reality.

Sounds intriguing. Couldn’t find it on zoopla.

Not sure what the unwritten rules are around self promoting your own property for sale on here ha ha ha.

Check Wooster and Stock’s website, it’s on there

It's not helped by estate agents taking pictures from the upper corner with the a super wide angle lens which makes everywhere look more spacious

Why are there always so many places for sale on Camberwell Grove? Whenever I cycle through I always wonder.

Are there? They’re probably all £1.5m plus houses that never really come up on my radar. We considered staying in London, but couldn’t afford anywhere bigger in Camberwell, and had no desire to live elsewhere, so we’re now back in Ireland.

Yeah, all the big ones. There's never not 10 of them with boards outside.