Owning your own home

I like how you've done your path.

"Distressed trip-hazard"

Briefly stopped to take a picture at one point

#parquetlife

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You mean the people in the house currently are nightmare neighbours?

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The bin crews regularly refuse to empty their bins.

Quite right if it's an AirBnB as the council doesn't collect commercial waste for free.

I know that house. We moved into a place just the other side of the railway that had been on the market for 6 months. Seemed sus but the neighbours are great, so I think it was the various other issues such as constant trains, subsidence and sitting tenants when viewing that were the problem.

How do prospective buyers know that though?

You scope out where you’re buying before putting down 700 large ones.

Do you tho?

I mean we looked at the neighbours gardens and made a guess. For one house my OH immediately vetoed it due to the neighbour on one sides garden.

But we really didn't vet the neighbours as much as we probably should have.

We did Drive bys at various times of the day and week to see how busy, noisy everything was.

We visited our house once, 200 miles away, seemed fine, luckily the neighbours are fine. Some friends of ours bought a place in Surrey, visited the house once, moved in, found out the guy 2 houses down likes to have garden parties for entire weekends non stop.

That's bloody lovely

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We knocked on the neighbour's door with the pretence of asking them about the rest of the neighbourhood but really to check them out (their garden is a bit "unusual" so wanted to confirm that they weren't crazy).

We visited the house a second time, and were made to feel like it was a massive imposition by the EA.

However, I wonder if that is a tacticsl to both reduce effort and reduce the risk of the buyer spotting something that puts them off.

Top tip right there!

Can't let that buyers remorse set in

Oddly that reminds me of a place I saw before moving to the sticks.
It was top two floors in a town house with steps down to the garden which was 100% owned by the top two floors. The seller was there and she explained they let the downstairs neighbour use the garden and if I bought I’d have to do the same.
There were 5 dogs in the garden next door too.
Good one two deal breaker.

FT Article - Yikes! What should I do with my mortgage?

Do not 'accept cookies' or it might boot you behind the paywall.

We knocked on the neighbour's door with the pretence of asking them about the rest of the neighbourhood but really to check them out (their garden is a bit "unusual" so wanted to confirm that they weren't crazy).

I wondered why all these random people have been knocking on my door asking me about the local neighborhood.

Good reading.

Tracker... (note that arrangement fees of £999 are broadly similar to fixes).

This ^ is a good eg of why it's all down to personal circumstances and doing all the calculations. I can't recall exactly, but a mate was offered an insanely low 1yr, but once you actually added the fee in/out fees the 3yr was cheaper.

Obviously if your monthly payments are high then a £k on fees might be negligible, but if they're lower then it changes the value proposition.

Incredible... it'd be totally up to you whether to let the downstairs neighbour continue to use the garden.

We have a driveway and first floor used to use it, in agreement with our seller. We've landscaped it into a bit of a garden now, with a gate and fence across, so it can be used as a driveway when needed by family.

Of course no one, at any point, stipulated that we had to continue to let the 1st floor use it.

I viewed the house I purchased a year ago for the grand total of 10 minutes, on one occasion, before buying it six months later. I walked past it just before we exchanged contracts and as it was still standing there I decided to go ahead.

For various reasons, I probably viewed the house I bought about a dozen times. Towards the end the estate agents were just happy to give me the keys for an hour (property was vacant which obviously made it a lot easier).