Owning your own home

Your main objective atm is to secure it. You can worry about what the ultimate price is that you end up paying in a few weeks time

This sort of attitude just further fuels the house price inflation/frenzy

Pay what you think the house is worth and what you can afford,even if interest rates skyrocket.
Don't pay 10s of thousands above asking just to be sure you'll secure it, unless the above two points are met

P.s. I think I'm the only guy here that wants to see the righteous justice and retribution meted out to the other dimwits in your chain

Everyone else is right, but that is no fun

I wish everyone would just communicate better

It absolutely astounds me how poor the communication appears to be in a chain.

A weekly call between the agents and solicitors to go over what has been done, what is being done and what is needed.

A monthly call with all of the buyers and sellers to address the niggly stuff.

Instead, we rely on solicitors that don't have the time, and estate agents that are kids in bad suits.

Are there any house buying as a service companies? The answer is no but it would be a pretty straightforward thing to create.

Property buying agents exist for high end stuff but I can’t see how the fee pool in the average transaction is big enough to support hiring really competent people, and there’s no tech solution.

Opendoor has professionalised this in the US by taking properties onto its own balance sheet - but that has its own issues.

Would we all spend a bit more on fees if we could get a better service? I think I would.

On my sale the agents fees were circa £10k and the conveyancing solicitor £1.5k. How can it be right that the agent earns over 6x the conveyancer?

If purchase falls through, aren't you still going to be on the hook for solicitor fees?

exactly. what will make this process simpler is more stakeholders :-)

edit: i also believe some higher end solicitors can take on more of the shit eating and then becomes integrated into their service

@princeperch

When we bought this place (and a share of the freehold), the vendor's solicitor was telling our solicitor that one of the freeholders wanted the Land Registry plans changed to reflect something incredibly minor and insignificant.

We didn't have an issue with it (actually made sense), but in the end the plans weren't changed.

Three days after we moved in, we bumped into the other freeholder and they asked "what was going on with the Land Registry plans? I don't have an issue with any of it, but it seemed a bit of a strange request..."

So yeh, they'd been told that we were asking for the change to the plans.

What I am saying is that you never know what absolute horseshit someone in the chain is being fed by a "kid in a bad suit" (I'll steal that one!) or some weirdo solicitor who has a "10 Rillington Place" vibe about them.

Some huge % of that agent fee goes to Rightmove these days. We looked at buying an estate agency chain for work and the economics are far shittier than you would expect, even in London. Earnings are volatile as well.

Well I've drawn a line under it as of 5 minutes ago. 1.5k has been agreed. I could have dug my heels in and got them up to 2k I reckon but I just want to move on now.

I sort of accept the agent fees as a necessary evil.

I would rather everyone paid more for conveyancers so we got quality professionals doing the job, rather than battery farm conveyancing with inexperienced para legals doing the work due to a race to the bottom on fees.

Congrats! Hopefully all done and dusted asap and you can get on with your life!

Without being nosy would you share the commission rate as a percentage you had to pay?

I just want to move on now

that's the spirit.

But I have to ask - who stumped up the £1.5k?

I think we paid 1.6% with Savills. They were good, so I can't complain.

The problem in our process was the buyers conveyancer. I will have my vengeance on him, in this life or the next.

Yes - although I’ve probably been unlucky in having “quality professionals” (including this thread’s former favourite conveyancer) also screw things up with basic process errors.

Regulating conveyancers as full solicitors might help this?

Congrats. Good luck for exchange

When I bought as a first time buyer I made the mistake of using Gisby Harrison (not Martin Browne). They were useless.

I have a solid gold recommendation for conveyancing now though.

Well there has been no adjustment to my documentation so it seems that the agents have all reduced their commission.

The arrangement is that the agent selling me the house I am buying returns my holding deposit of 1k which I had to put down to stop them showing the house to anyone else (which isn't a legally enforceable arrangement but I went along with it to secure it) and he will then pay me 1k on top of that. my agent selling my house is reducing his commission by 500 quid.

It hasn't therfore been totally lost on me that the polluter isn't paying, which is what I really wanted. Hopefully she had a few sleepless nights over it anyway.

The bloke selling my house is a small estate agency with him and his wife running it and freelance photographers and social media managers. He doesn't have a high street ground floor glass plated office like most of the others. He Said it costs him 26k in fixed costs a month before he starts to make any money.

costs him 26k in fixed costs a month before he starts to make any money

Ouch. That said, if you have a mature lettings book clipping 15% of rent payments every month it goes quite some way to defraying that.

Where is the £26k going?

He was primarily crying about what rightmove charge him. I suspect he doesn't get much change out of 400 quid for the photographer each time he lists either so I guess it all mounts up.

Ha - I reckon he is doing alright.