Owning your own home

generally a place that needs a lot of work will be a better deal than paying for something that has been done up to sell.

May be different elsewhere, but in London this really doesn’t seem to be the case. Places that are in good condition certainly sell faster, but prices on equivalent run down places are rarely low enough to account for the cost of the work necessary to get them up to the same standard.

@Fox @Howard

Thanks for your input it was helpful in asking and questioning the correct parties involved.
After speaking to the EA he genuinely was surprised that the seller was going through a probate, seller did not disclose this to the EA! I await a further response early next week. Fingers crossed.

Yep! You need to give notice of an foundation that are going on within a certain distance from a party wall, the foundations on the other side of the house were still within that area (think it was about 3m).

I have Revolute. Not sure I remember seeing credit score stuff but I don't often look at their app.

It sounds like it'll be easier to join one of them, get report and kill account before they bill me then. Plus it's one less company with my data.

"You get credit reports for free from all three UK agencies"

What three? DPA? HMRC?

It's the bank asking. The least amount of shit I can give them the better.

Credit Reference Agencies - Transunion (formerly CallCredit), Experian, Equifax

The bank are asking for a credit report? That's odd. They'd nomally ask for permission to access your credit record, as they have a feed from the agencies.

in this country the general behaviour is to do up a place to sell, and everybody on the seller side gets a cut on this "effort". It maintains low standards in construction as tradespeople make design decisions. There aren't many of those properties, and if there are, they won't be advertised / will be sold ahead or very quickly to cash buyers/investors.
I maintain, in the long run, if you can get your hands on it and negotiate well, you will get a better deal. not by a massive amount probably if you want high standard, but at least you choose your own specs

Ours was renovated by the seller, who is a builder, prior to us buying it. Most of the work is "ok", and passed the structural survey anyway, but a lot is quite bodgy and clearly done by a jack of all trades. I guess they spent 10k excluding self labour and upped the price by 40k. I really would have preferred them to leave it and just inflate the price.

sadly this is the current state of affairs.
When i bought a flat the estate agent called us ahead, we had made it clear that we were in the construction business and wanted a place with some work. we probaly paid 40-50k less than market value for the surface, but probably spent 10k more then that due to design choices. a tradesman could have done it up for 25k.

When we bought, we arranged additional surveys on key concerns off the back of the homeowners survey (electrics, gas, roof, asbestos). This gave us a good idea of what needed doing, and the people doing the surveys were happy to discuss cost of repairs. We then worked out what reductions we wanted for what, and took the info to the seller. Worked well - got our reductions without seeming unreasonable.

Sounds like the same thing here as with you and Dov.

The surveyor the neighbour chose wasn't cheap but they'd used them before. Looks like the 2.5k doesn't include a few follow up calls and a visit as they knew the neighbour was difficult and were happy to just field the calls knowing that nothing would come of it (i.e. neighbour built a fence in our garden a couple of years ago and seemed to be hoping we'd build the extension in line with their hopeful fence placement rather than the actual boundary).

What could have been a really nice I'll sort out anything that goes wrong type of deal, turned into nearly £2k for me and I basically loathe her now.

Pretty much this. Despite being, um, eccentric, neighbour used to be all smiles - baking cakes in summer etc. but they've been belligerent throughout the process. Especially annoying since we made no fuss during the 6+ months of renovations work they did before they moved in.

Hey ho.

Can anyone recommend an online kitchen designer / planner where you can put your own dimensions in and it spits a 3d plan out?

And the trouble is they tend to be done to the same bland specifications - cheap kitchen, grey carpets etc - it seems wasteful ripping it out and doing it tastefully, but disappointing to pay for and live in a new home that isn't how you'd like it.

https://home.by.me/en/
And the IKEA one is pretty decent

Ta!

Does anyone know how to view an old rightmove listing from 6 months ago. For a property that didn't sell and was taken off the market?

often if you google ‘road name, postcode’ it brings up the rightmove page with previous listings, ordered by date sold - might show up there, though not sure if it only shows sold properties or not.

Zoopla lets you do that if it was on both (most do tend to be).

Is there some kind of mismatch or has something been declined?

Can anyone in Bristol recommend a small, competent firm of solicitors please? The two I have been recommended and tried so far (albeit not in Bristol) are too busy to take on new work

The house we're trying to buy was underpinned about 15 years ago.
Our surveyor suggests there is "progressive movement" at the site of the underpinning.
Mortgage issues aside (which may ultimately prevent a purchase), what questions should we be asking the vendor and their solicitor?
We've already asked to see their current building insurance to see the extent of cover, exclusions, conditions and excess.
The house has been rented for some time and some of the repairs have been done poorly.
Nothing major but does suggest the property hasn't been looked after properly.
There have been some repairs to cracks in the basement (which has been underpinned) which have not used the correct plaster or filler.
We're preparing to walk away (again) but there's a lot we like about the house.
Two previous offers have fallen through so the vendor may be up for a deal but we'd like to gauge the risks involved, including the impact on a future sale.
We're involving our surveyor throughout and he's quite positive about the place.

New neighbour moved in last week, a month of living here with the previus neighbour (couple and teenage daughter) and we heard them less than 5 times through the walls.

New neighbour is a single man, great we thought!
He's so far spends 75% of his time shouting down the phone and we can hear every fucking word he says.

We have a similar guy next to us, he rarely leaves the house, if we happen to be coming or going at the same time he will pause and slowly close his door to wait for us to leave, and we hear him swearing (possibly on the phone) about how his independence is being taken away from him by either some fucking cunt or the fucking Chinese and their Chinese virus

Is he WFH? I must admit I think I have difficult controlling my "indoor voice" on long zoom-based meetings and especially lecturing. I'm sure the neighbours are getting pissed off.