Where to live

NotAGolf

NotAGolf

NotAGolf

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Joined
22 Oct 2005
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Moving...
Is there any way you can 'research' a certain town?

The reason I ask is my girlfriend and I are looking at buying a house soon, and one of the issues is that we don't know much about a lot of the locations we're looking at. Obviously we know a bit about the places where we live and work currently , but we're pretty flexible with where we're looking to live so there a lots of town's we've never even been to before.

Obviously going there and having a mooch around would be the best bet but that's not ideal when you've got lots of places to look at.

I think I've seen a website before that you can enter the town and it will give you a general overview of that place. It was geared towards people looking at buying a property so it focused on things that might sway your decision like in terms of house prices, crime rates, schools, ammenities etc.

Anyone know of any decent resources like this?
Thanks.
 
Chichester. Willing to commute though so anywhere within a 15 mile radius really. Nearer the better but if there's somewhere much nicer a little further away then definietly would consider.

I'm pretty sure that upmystreet link is what I saw. Not sure how accurate it is though, although you never can be accurate with such a broad range of houses I suppose...
 
rent there first - i honestly dont think an overview of a town is ever enough
you need to know which are the nice areas / roads - where is convenient for work / socialising / shopping
if we'd have bought when we first moved down here - we'd have been miles out of the way, in a crappy area - all becuase what we'd read up on bared no relation to what it turned out we actually wanted!
 
goldilocks said:
rent there first - i honestly dont think an overview of a town is ever enough
you need to know which are the nice areas / roads - where is convenient for work / socialising / shopping
if we'd have bought when we first moved down here - we'd have been miles out of the way, in a crappy area - all becuase what we'd read up on bared no relation to what it turned out we actually wanted!
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Good advice. Rent for a few months to get a feel for the place - you might not even like the town as a whole, and end up living elsewhere.
 
Renting's a bit of a pain though.

We'd both rather get a place and settle in. We've been in and out of houses for 3 years at uni, spent another year and a half split between living at home and traveling so we've been back and forward a lot. Would be nice to have somewhere to finally call home.

Aren't the majority of contracts for renting a year long as well? We're both quite against the idea of renting as well with it being 'dead money' so to speak. And also with property prices being fairly cheap atm and we've got the money so it should be a good time to buy.
 
mpledge52 said:
Renting's a bit of a pain though.

We'd both rather get a place and settle in. We've been in and out of houses for 3 years at uni, spent another year and a half split between living at home and traveling so we've been back and forward a lot. Would be nice to have somewhere to finally call home.

Aren't the majority of contracts for renting a year long as well? We're both quite against the idea of renting as well with it being 'dead money' so to speak. And also with property prices being fairly cheap atm and we've got the money so it should be a good time to buy.
Click to expand...

Understandable. If you want to skip the whole nightmare of moving twice in quick succession, the main pieces of advice would be to check out the postcode on UpMyStreet (the overviews are actually very accurate), then over the space of two weeks make regular visits by car to the area in the afternoon, and the evening around 8pm.

Park up somewhere close to the house and have a 15 minute dander around the area together. Do this repeatedly over the course of the time, including friday and sunday evenings (you'd be surprised how much trouble occurs on a sunday).

That'll give you the best idea of what it's like.
 
Pestilence said:
Understandable. If you want to skip the whole nightmare of moving twice in quick succession, the main pieces of advice would be to check out the postcode on UpMyStreet (the overviews are actually very accurate), then over the space of two weeks make regular visits by car to the area in the afternoon, and the evening around 8pm.

Park up somewhere close to the house and have a 15 minute dander around the area together. Do this repeatedly over the course of the time, including friday and sunday evenings (you'd be surprised how much trouble occurs on a sunday).

That'll give you the best idea of what it's like.
Click to expand...

Cheers. Will definitely do a few visits to the area before considering it.

Where does upmystreet gets all it's info from? For me it's pretty inaccurate, but then again I think my street is a bit different from all the other houses in the area so it's probably right for the majority.
 
If you're looking at commuting I'd recommend checking out the transport links and traffic at peak times (appreciate this can be difficult when working fulltime!). When I lived in Southampton it used to take a good 20min+ just getting onto the motorway from our house (and vice-versa), compared to say 5mins at night.

If parking is potentially an issue (no drive/garage etc) then that's another thing to check in the evening. While doing so I tend to look at the age/type of cars in the area, now obviously just because someone has old car it doesn't mean they are lowlife, but generally if there are a sizeable number of new/posh motors it tends to indicate affluence and probably less chance of troublesome neighbours.

Finally one piece of advice I'd give is not to rush into it by trying to convince yourself that a house is better than it is, when we bought our first house I think we were so desperate to live together that we bought the first house we liked without really taking everything into consideration. The area wasn't the greatest (big block of flats fairly nearby) and a park that is lovely in the daytime may be full of kids at night. Resale value is important even if you don't plan on moving for ages (plans can change) so even things that may not bother you (downstairs bathroom in our case) should be weighed up in terms of how other people might view them.
 
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