lol - probably in seacroft! and they still wouldn't be worth it.
Buying a property next year
- Thread starter CLAWS
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lol - probably in seacroft! and they still wouldn't be worth it.
The figures were just quoted for example and to make it easy. The point I was making was that while prices are falling why would you want to buy? One reason would be to use the weak market to get a bargain from a forced seller. I bought a house last year at the top of the market - knowing it was at the top but happy to do so because it was below the (then) current market price and I had family reasons to do so.
But would I buy right now? Nope. Is my house now worth less than I paid for it? Probably? Will it be worth less next year? Yes, quite likely.
I don't get this.
Surely an EA wants to make as much money as possible from selling houses regardless of the actual house price?
If houses are increasing in price and still selling then that's great for the EA.
In a market like the current climate where transaction volumes have plummeted the EA is utterly foolish to be bullish on property.
If they have been getting 100 transactions per month at an average price of £200,000 and now they are getting 50 transactions per month at an average of £220,000 their commision has fallen through the floor.
In this case it makes sense to try and get their clients to reduce prices to get transaction volumes up again.
But that sends out negative messages to the market and buyers don't walk in the door. See your point though.
Soldato
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An estate agent said the same thing to my sister in 1991 when valueing her studio flat in Surrey. He valued it at £35k when she had paid nearly £60k 18 months before
Firstly they have to get you to agree to sell your house via them - so they'll tell you your house is worth more than it actually is, then when you haven't sold for a few months they'll tell you to drop the price.
Stinky may confirm this, but I've always suspected that a lot of the time people only put their house on the market out of interest to see what they can get for it, and only get serious about selling when they get offers above what they thought they'd get. People just can't play that game in a market with falling house prices - this is why confidence is so important to our economy.
this cant be done now, as every home on the markets needs a HIP costing a minimum of £299 + VAT (for us as an agent) this is to be paid for by the client (vendor) therefore only people that want to sell put there houses on the market now.
we are still valuing houses at the same price as about 6months ago (yes prices have flattened out) but certainly not under there value of 6months prior.
and house are still moving at around the rpice they are on for. but, yes - there are a lot of lower offers coming in because of the news, but this has not affect our vendors, we simply advise them to wait and see what else we can do with the purchaser. 9/10 times they will come up with the correct offer. people are just be cheaky at the moment due to the news.
While there is a lot of media hype surrounding this kind of thing, some of it is just that - hype. Any kind of story surrounding the finances of the general public tends to snowball and receives a lot of media coverage. Stories which were once found buried in a column at the bottom of page 26 a year ago are now flagged with an industry buzzword such as CREDIT CRUNCH and find themselves with a doomsayer headline on page 5.
I am not seeking to downplay the problems, some of which are very real, but rather point out that the severity of problems should not be considered to be directly proportional to the amount of media coverage (and in particular, headlines) it receives.
In recent months I've read plenty of articles which seem to have been formulated with an agenda "MORE EVIDENCE OF HOUSING MARKET SLOWDOWN", yet read the full article and interpret the data and you see that well, maybe things aren't quite as drastic as the spin implies. Annual house price changes are still even now greater than inflation - or in other words, while house prices are falling, the falls in the second part of the year to date are smaller than the rises in the first part of the year. It is of course a worrying trend should it continue, but for most people housing is not a short term investment (and I don't just mean a purely financial or speculative investment).
What's more, some of the stories which are angling at proof of impending doom can be interpreted in more than one way. Is a fall in mortgage lending really such a bad thing? All that means is that less money is being borrowed, it doesn't mean that our housing stock has necessarily depreciated. Look at the CML stats and you can see that mortgage lending was lower in 2005 than it was in 2004 (the last time this happened) - yet average UK house prices actually ROSE during that period of declining lending.
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