Owning your own home

Thanks, have spoken to ZFN and had an estimate back.

Zaid is pretty good, my in-laws just got a survey done last week and were impressed too, tell him Fran from Leyton says hi! P.S: he is not the fastest, but communication and level of detail are seriously worth it!

Don't you need to have been there for two years before buying it? I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure there's something like that.

There's a rule with leasehold flats that you need to be living in the property for two years before you can extend. However if the current owners have been living in the property for two years, and they want to sell, they can extend as part of the sale on behalf of the buyer.

I'm not sure if that applies to buying the freehold - I'm pretty sure it doesn't - but leasehold for houses and flats is very different so with stuff like this its always worth getting in writing from your lawyer because the courts are full of salesmen who've told lessees that they can buy the freehold for cheap then upped the price to triple the cost without warning.

Leasehold is a sewer.

I’m looking for recommendations for a good independent mortgage advisor. We’re in south east London

Thanks

When we were planning to buy a second property and rent out our first we tried http://www.independentjames.com.
Very helpful and good to deal with.
In the end though we did a straightforward sell and buy and found we could get a better deal direct with Halifax.

Mike at Crystal clear he’s been a go-to forum adviser for a while,
did my first mortgage which was tricky being self employed and he’s right now sorting my partners (ours) new mortgage.

he’s sorting out the complex stuff of porting 2 products into one and then the deals ending within a few months of each other to consolidate into one mortgage 2 years down the line. stuff we would have no idea about.

https://crystalclearfs.com/about-us/

Great stuff. Thanks

We went with independentjames, found them to be great. Was a bit weird as we knew the product we wanted, just wanted to chat really to make sure we weren’t being idiots. Plus always nice to talk to someone non-scary when you’re self-employed. They confirmed our choice was a good fit, sorted it out and also waived their fees for us too, lovely. Cute card once we’d moved in as well.

Noted, thanks.

I'm no longer self employed, so am hoping that'll make things a bit easier.

Thanks

This! Go with Mike, he's just so good. He kept me sane through our first house purchase, he chased when I couldn't any more and he was just a good source of info through the whole process.

If you’re the freeholder, who do you pay ground rent to?

Good point! I misspoke, it's not actually ground rent, it's a "rentcharge". The difference being ground rents is paid by leaseholders and rentcharges are paid by freeholders. From https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rentcharges:

A rentcharge is an annual sum paid by a freehold homeowner to a third party who normally has no other interest in the property.
...
Most rentcharges have existed for many centuries, and are part of an historic system whereby land owners who released part of their land for development could charge a regular payment from the people living on it.

Probably some feudal lord instigated the charge and has passed this on to their descendants "Homeground Management Services"

Listen to my tale of woe:

A while back, after the UK signed up to the Kyoto Protocols, the Government thought it would be a wizard wheeze to hand out grants to homeowners wanting to insulate their properties. Over the past 35 years, millions of homes in the UK have been retrofitted with cavity wall insulation (CWI) to "improve energy efficiency".

Unfortunately this mad flurry of cash brought all the cowboys and shysters out of the woodwork, and many retrofit jobs were either done without due care and attention, done when they shouldn't have been, or in some extreme cases, claimed to have been done and actually not done at all.

This is a national scandal on par with the cladding fiasco, and affected homeowners are finding it hard to get recompense.

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that putting CWI into a house with timber beams (as opposed to a brick external and concrete block internal structure) is a massively bad idea, as the timber has no ventilation and any moisture which gets in can cause rot.

Enter yours truly, who's just found out that the previous owner of his (timber-framed) house had CWI installed a good few years ago, and that no-one will buy said house until it's been hoovered out at great expense, and been given the all-clear that it won't collapse in the next strong breeze.

Very stressful, would not recommend.

Unfortunately this mad flurry of cash brought all the cowboys and shysters out of the woodwork, and many retrofit jobs were either done without due care and attention, done when they shouldn't have been

Yeah. Can’t help but feel this is what has been happening again over the last five years or so. As soon as grants come out, so do the tricksters.

Was there some chat about little plug in electric heaters recently? Can’t someone recommend me something for my garden office to warm it up in the mornings?

We got this from john lewis just before Xmas (it was discounted too for some reason)
We use it in our front room most mornings - it heats it up within a few minutes, really impressive.
Don't know about cost of using it, kinda burying my head about energy costs at the moment...
https://www.johnlewis.com/john-lewis-partners-mini-tower-fan-heater-white/p4775719

Been trying to buy a little Warner flat in E10 for the last nine or so months. Our buyers have pulled out three times, and our seller put the place up on the market over Xmas, but we just got a third buyer in just after Xmas and our seller took it off the market. This is real last-gasp territory for us, this process has been really hard, but we were feeling as though we were finally on the last stretch and we had a proper run at it.

Walked past the place on Sunday and saw another couple outside the place clearly discussing whether or not to put an offer in. The place isn't online anymore, so he's clearly conducting additional negotiations.

How can we buy off someone who is so fundamentally dishonest about the way they conduct the sale? How are we supposed to keep our energy up when he's just straight up lying to our faces? How the heck does anyone manage to keep their humanity when the London property market is full of these people?!

Tories' love for deregulation probably helped too...

I understand your frustration, it is a really really complicated process and it seems has been even more tricky for you... but you might find something better (and cheaper) and be in a more proceedable position in the near future. There will be more properties for sale in spring/summer and, hopefully, that will turn the tables.

Also, try to see things from their perspective (difficult, I know) they might need the money, or simply got tired of waiting and unfortunately things are made to work in their favor (nothing is final until exchange)

If you are really keen on this place your best chance might be to reach completion asap, so try to speed the process up as much as you can. If they waited this long they are nor that bad and you might still have a fighting chance

So frustrating. It's a bit of a shit situation for you both, I imagine the seller is wanting to hedge their bets by testing more buyers on the E10 flat - it's been 9 months of insecurity for them as well, after 3 lots of your buyers failing, they will be asking themselves how progressable you are. After 9 months Id say thats pretty patient. The system doesn't make it easy for anyone.

I totally get that, and you're right of course - it's a shark pit for everyone - I think I'd just find it much easier to take if he was a bit more honest with us and said 'I'm not prepared to take it off the market and you'll have to take your chances'. At least we'd have had an accurate understanding of the situation. It's the relief of tension followed by the realisation that I was stupid to allow myself to feel that relief.

I feel the frustration of shelling out time and money, going through the whole chain process, and then having it fail before completion.
Why there's no initial bond put up by both sides at the very start I don't know. Other countries do that.

Was there some chat about little plug in electric heaters recently? Can’t someone recommend me something for my garden office to warm it up in the mornings?

@Velocio ?

I'd strongly recommend an electric oil filled radiator if you can get one, rather than those standard heaters. They don't dry the air out in the same way and it's a much more natural feeling kind of heat.