If It Looks Like a Bubble...

I just saw this. Pretty nifty, eh? Rising house prices in over half of the country, and up 1.1% per month in London. But let's all consider the closing sentence:

"But he said the rising pressure was not blocking new buyers from the property market because of higher loan-to-value (LTV) lending."

I'll tell you all something - he's talking shit. Ok we might be able to get a 95% LTV mortgage, but let's suppose we're trying to buy a 3-bed mid-terraced house in Cam, for £250k (which I've well established is what all the non-crappy places are advertised at at a minimum, and you can check out this lovely stats page for all the housing options. Top tip; you can't afford a detached house, so don't even look). So we just need a £12,500 for a deposit. Woo! Yay, tick we've got that. Let's go ask a bank if they'll lend us £237,500.

Well first we'll do a bit of averaging of earnings. According to the ONS, for our age bracket we should be both earning £412 per week*, and supposing that holds for 52 weeks of the year, we'll put that at annual salaries of £21,424 each (ignoring that women still typically earn less, but that's for a whole other blog).

Plug the numbers into, oh let's go with the Nationwide's mortgage calculator (because they're "On Your Side" after all), and they'd be willing to lend us a grand total of... £187,100!

Just a £50k deficit, which is not enough to be covered by the government's Help to Buy scheme. So how are Jo and Joe Average going to get their dream (and by dream I mean it's roughly in the city, has some walls and windows and no major structural defects) 3-bed house to start a family. Cause yeah, wait, that £187,100 you can borrow is dependent on you not having any other outgoings except student loans. Don't you dare think you could get a mortgage like that if you have children!

*taken from here which I realise is a year out of date, but who's honestly had a substantial pay rise since then.

Fail Number 2

Our offer was the second highest by noon today, beaten only by a few grand (less than 5 and more than 1 according to the agent). We were asked for our "best and final offer" by 1 hour afterwards, which we put forth, and we just found out that we've been beaten again, hence have not secured the house. Yet another win for "more than £15k over the asking price". I think the house did go to some FTBs at least which is nice to know... Hoping they can't get a mortgage though! Always a faithful back up...

In fairness, the sellers were very nice (particularly if they did sell the place to FTBs) and the agents were mostly helpful, aside from not being contactable for the entirety of the weekend.

Offer!

We put in an offer yesterday on a nice 3-bed mid-terraced place. It already had the asking price, so we bid higher... Seems to be the kind of thing to do given our experience. If we don't get it with this we'll seriously have to consider what the hell we have to do because bids are going mental everywhere. Sigh. 

The estate agents was closed Saturday afternoon through to Monday morning, so we'll have to wait until tomorrow to hear anything back, or even to hear that they've received our offer. Seems kinda stupid to have a day full of viewings, but then be closed for nearly 48 hours so you can't take formal offers, although I bet that's tactical so it allows load of people to put in bids and then we can all fight it out later. Boy am I not looking forward to that.

New Builds

Apparently, new builds were meant to ease the problem of housing all the people in the country. You know, by making more houses us lot who don't own houses can buy, thus we're then owning a house and are sorted. Tick. I draw all of your attention to this section of an ad for a resale of a recent new build in Cambridge;

"***investment opportunity*** Convenient for Cambridge Science Park and the City Centre, this four bedroom, 3 storey town house, in Orchard Park Cambridge, has four bedrooms, fitted kitchen with built in appliances with a further two reception rooms. Being sold with tenants in situ. Investor info £4611 pre tax income: 4.69% of £98, 300 capital used."

It was build in 2009, and already is being rented out (hence likely just bought up from new build by a landlord), and now is being resold... to another landlord. Great. Thanks guys!

Sigh.

The new new-builds in Cam at the moment are either tiny one/two bed flats, or 4+ bed detached houses costing £400k+ Who the heck was needing these houses to be built! Certainly not FTBs. Although, I've just noted, on a Trumpington new build (4 bed for £495k), there's a little illustration about how Help to Buy works! Because I'm totally only able to come up with a 5% deposit but magically be able to afford a £371k mortgage. Facepalm.
A single option of a 3-bed is available, for £385k, but on the ground floor you only get one room as a kitchen/sitting/dining room combo. Not a bad size... but well above the national average for a 3-bed semi, and even epically above the price of some 3-bed semis much closer to Cambridge.

Seriously, who is buying these places and why aren't they building affordable homes, by which I mean at or below the local (or ideally) national average?

Open Houses

3-bed terraced house popped onto the market last night that looks interesting. Ooo let's phone up the agency (for anonymity we'll call these Luung) and book a viewing for tonight/this weekend. No. Don't do that because we're only allowed to see it in 8 days time at an open house because they can't be bothered to send someone out for a mere 15 minutes to show us around it on our own. 

Cram in the buyers, and forget the customer service. That's how they sell houses in Cambridge! 

That's them off my list for when we sell a place ourselves.

Mystery House!

"A great opportunity to purchase this 3 Bed Semi Detached House with Driveway parking and set on a generous plot offering: 2 Reception rooms, Kitchen, Family Bathroom, 3 Good sized bedrooms and huge potential to extend with the current owners having previously had planning permission apprived. A MUST SEE."

A must see!?

Some photos would be nice then estate agent! Just a picture of the outside at present, which may have just been grabbed from streetview.

Also, spell-checking wouldn't go amiss. 

House-buying fun...

So, let me just set the scene for you; I'm trying to buy a house in Cambridge. To clarify, I'm trying to buy a house in Cambridge that I want to live in myself, that will be the only house I own, and I'm not rich. I bet you can imagine the fun I'm having right now.

For those of you who aren't aware, the market in Cambridge seems similar to London in its ruthlessness, however is thankfully not as expensive. Yet.

A typical viewing scenario goes like this:

1) See house online during the week.

2) Book viewing for the weekend.

3) Turn up along with a queue of other potential buyers.

4) Walk around bumping into other people, not having your questions answered by the agents.

5) Get a phone call on Monday (or earlier) asking you if you want to put in an offer, and by the way, the asking price has already been achieved by some number of other bidders. P.S are you a cash buyer?

Now I just want to make this clear; any old shit sells! We've seen nice places, and right wrecks and everything follows this pattern, because the wrecks are a bit cheaper, so for £10k cash, someone will do the place up and either rent it out or pop it back on the market for a profit quick as a flash. It's infuriating.

The best, and by best I mean worst, estate agency here (let's call them 'Shrub' for anonymity and all that) have got the system sorted to a tee. They post a picture of the outside of a house online, a location, and a number of bedrooms (typically 3). Everyone flocks to it with NO OTHER INFORMATION. A queue of people forms on Saturday traipsing around the place, which is inevitable rubbish, so many of us have wasted at least an hour of our lives. On top of it all, the agent who meets you at the property can't answer any questions about it because, hilariously, this is the first time they've seen it too! On Monday morning, chirpy as anything, I get a phone call asking "we're just wondering if you have any feedback about the house?" "Hi, thanks yes we won't be proceeding any further with this property", and in my head "because it's a pile of wank." But they have offers on it anyway so it doesn't really matter to them, they'd just like to have more to push up the price you see.

Let's just imagine for one moment that we've finally tracked down a nice house, in our price range, and we want to put an offer in on it. So we do. Woo! But also, eek; scary! But don't worry, because within two days you get told that the offer you put in, at the asking price, has been topped by someone offering £20k more. Do you want to increase your offer? No, fuck off, we've hit the limit of the potential mortgage a bank would lend us. Someone will battle it out though, I bet. 

Back to square one for us. It seems whatever we look at, will actually sell for at least £10k more than the guide price so we've got to start looking at lower initial value properties so we can eventually pay through the teeth for one and whatever price we end at is still within budget. Funtimes. Not.