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You send them an email asking for information under the Freedom of Information act. That's all there is to it. They have 20 days to reply. Your request would almost certainly get refused as it'd count as personal information and so is exempt. But there would be plenty more awkward questions you could ask that I'm sure the council wouldn't want making public yet is compelled to do so by law.

Here's a couple of examples: one Two It mostly seems to be ones that have been to be auction before. My best guess was they'd failed to sell at auction but somehow there were still auction fees to be paid. Looking through the list again it's mostly the stuff at the bottom of the market (although still overpriced for the area) I found it mad that they weren't selling so someone was essentially putting a price increase on them.

I'm seeing more and more listings on Rightmove with "BUYERS PREMIUM REQUIRED". It started of with the just a few but over the past few months I can now find dozens listed with it. I'm struggling to find out what this actually is. I rang an estate agent but they wouldn't give any details until I first gave them my details. None of these properties are anything I'm interested in but I'm troubled that this practice (what ever it is) seems to be spreading. Anyone know?

Has anyone else noticed things seem to have ground to a halt in terms of new right move listings? In the usual price bandings I check I was seeing around a dozen new adverts a week. This has dropped to half a dozen over the last few weeks. Some of the 'new' listings are house I've seen before under offer that are suddenly back on the market. What's going on?

Can you explain how the market is stressed? I've been using PropertyBee the past couple months but I've only been using it to watch what changes the estate agents make to the adverts. It's been particularly informative to see what sort of offers have been put in on right move. 57k becomes 50k for example and advertising for anyone to put in a higher offer. But there are also a lot of contradictions. Some flats have the Sold sign up before I've even noticed they were for sale. This is worrying because they must of sold above the normal price bands I check for these types of properties. The rental market has gone crazy since I moved here. When I first started looking five years ago I checked every main agent website and fish4.co.uk (it was before Rightmove) and there wasn't really much to choose from. Now every street has For Rent signs. There are at least two other large Property Management companies that have moved into the area too. I've not really seen rents reducing. They jumped during the boom but since then they've been fairly stagnant, the main bottom price point being £400/month regardless of the location or quality of the property. Occasionally I'll see a particular property clearly trying to undercut the competition but it doesn't really start a fire. Although admittedly, along with For Sales, I only check the bottom end of the market that I can afford so if there's been drops higher up I won't notice it. My theory is that with interest rates so low the landlords are paying so little on the mortgages there's little pressure on them to fill the voids.

"best of a bad bunch" is a pretty good way to describe it here. It's not a bad area but poor quality housing and there's certainly been an increase in the number of gangs of chavs walking the streets the past few years. I think if you're a young professional and need to be close to Newcastle there isn't much choice.

There are around 400 homes spreadout around Gateshead currently being knocked down. The council website has some nice maps on the affected areas: Neighbourhood planning in Gateshead There are plans for 1200 more. Some of the properties were council houses but I think they were mainly privately owned. Some streets have already been part demolished, others are all boarded up (This is in addition to all the other properties that are just sitting empty around Gateshead that aren't slated to be knocked down). The streets where the residents haven't been evicted yet, occasionally have "Save our homes" signs up in the windows. Most of the tyneside flats need refurbishment but there otherwise wasn't anything wrong with these flats other than not being familiy friendly. The council plan is to replace them with fewer more expensive homes. Although all this seems to have ground to halt for some reason. It's been described as ethnical cleansing of the working class.

Hi, does anyone have any comments on Gateshead? Particularly the Bensham area. I've rented here for almost 5 years but still don't know the area too well. I moved here because I was sick of the commute to work in Newcastle but where I am now I'm basically spending two hours a day walking too and from work, so I'm wanting to buy somewhere a bit closer. I've just about got a 10% deposit saved up but can't really make a decision on what to do. I have the tendency to over analyse things so I'm pretty much going around in circles in my head. I'm really only looking at the bottom of the market (£50k-£60k) I could stretch further but my raison d'être isn't to spend my life paying as much mortgage as possible. I know for some people this is peanuts but it isn't for me, I'm on 18k a year. I've just come back from walking the streets to look at some of the newer For Sale signs. There are several things that bother me about buying a flat in Bensham now (besides the standard the economy is on the verge of collapse/the government is pouring billions in to stop everything from crashing down.) 1. Tyneside Flats. Most of Bensham is Tyneside flats and they're the only properties within my price range (apart from the usual crud in sink estates). While I don't mind renting a tyneside flat I don't like the idea of actually buying one. The bathrooms are usually tiny (they were original built without a bathroom) and you can hear pretty much everything your neighbour, above or below, is doing. My gut tells me they're just not worth the money that's being asked for them. Around 2003 they were going for as little 20k. Are they now worth 4-5 times as much? I don't believe so but that's what the asking prices are at now. For the same time period in parts of Newcastle the council was essentially giving these types of flats away on the condition you spend a minimal amount on renovation. I don't mind buying one and saving money that allows me to have a better lifestyle. But buying one because it's the best I'm going to be able to afford is not an idea I like. 2. Prices. It's the prices that bother me most of all because there's no rhyme nor reason to them. A flat could be on the market for 70k and a few doors down is more or less the same property on for 90k. Because of the high density of property here and the relative cheapness at the start of the boom, Bensham was blighted by property flippers. I watched the same properties being bought and sold month after month, the price going up each time. Then when the crash came the flats were either rented out or just left empty. The flat above me had a For Sale sign on it for 4 years. The prices haven't dropped to what I believe is a reasonable amount but the market doesn't seem to be able to decide what to do, and along with it neither do I. If a standard 2 bed flat is going to stick at 75k or even increase, then fine, I'm happy staying renting, taking advantage of the freedom it allows me and otherwise just get on with my life. If it comes down to 55k then I'm interested in buying and then getting on with my life. There are some flats on for 55k in eastern Gateshead but they're in such a nasty area or poor state that they're not even a consideration for me. 10 years ago these same flats were going for 10k before the property flippers descended on their streets. Now if you look at these streets you see nothing but For Sale/For Rent signs. 3. Empty properties. This is another thing that really bothers me. I keep hearing about a property shortage and yet I walk past absolutely loads of empty properties. This is on top of all the For Rent and For Sale signs. Walking the same streets each day I see many properties that are just empty, not for sale or rent. There's two I pass on the way to the local shop that look to be partly renovated. One has an empty Dr Pepper can that's been sitting on the window sill for two years. This unnerves me because I can't help but feel something isn't functioning properly when you can have hundreds of properties that are just sitting empty. As part of my usual over analysis I've been reading through the council publications on housing in Gateshead. I think I read that 18% of the high rise flats are empty because no body wants to live there (large numbers of social needs tenants get placed there instead.) Bizarrely the few high rise flats I've seen for sale are quite expensive. There's just no logic to this. Gateshead council have been demolishing hundreds of tyneside flats because they claim families just don't want to live in them. The population of Gateshead is dropping as families leave the area for more suitable housing. I'm tired of not knowing what to do. I want to be able to make a decision and start working towards it. It's like I'm pretty sure the wings have just fallen off the plane but nobody else seems that bothered so I'm left wondering why I'm missing. So if anyone can offer some insight or advise, I'd really appreciate it.

I'm renting in Bensham at the moment and thinking about buying here. There's been loads of this type of property going to auction, I've been keeping my eye on the local market for over 3 years. Auctions scare me, although I'm not sure why, so I'm ignoring all these types of listing. I think asking prices on these auctions have little relation to what they're actually sold at, the agents are just trying to drum up interest. At the moment I've not seen so many For sale signs up since the boom when I watched the same flats being flipped monthly, prices going up each time. Loads of new Sold signs over the past few weeks too, which is making me anxious but I'm also uneasy with so many flats around here that were going for a third of their current price from as early as 2003. So I'm stuck in limbo. With the Tyneside flats I've been looking at, my instincts tell me they're only worth 40-55k but asking prices are still around 70-80k. For that price I might as well get a car and buy a proper house with a garden somewhere out of the way, like Wrekenton. So I'm stuck, don't know what to do. I'm looking in the bottom end of the property ladder (although I actually think I earn a decent wage for the area) but there's nothing I feel is worth the money.