[nuki]

worried1, on 22 March 2012 - 02:14 PM, said:

Bad luck with the offer, but I still think you did the right thing. Also, there are a lot of hurdles to go yet for the new buyer, so it is not over yet!

In my experience, EAs very rarely take a property off the market these days until much further into the process. In fact, I can't remember the last time I saw an 'Under Offer' or 'Sale Agreed' EA sign, they are always either 'For Sale' or 'Sold'.

Did the right thing under the circumstances... meaning my budget :-)

Unfortunately I will have to start looking for rentals soon, if I can't find something in the next couple of weeks.

I still can't send private messages, I'm wondering if 50posts is the limit.

[worried1]

anukis, on 22 March 2012 - 03:53 PM, said:

I still can't send private messages, I'm wondering if 50posts is the limit.

I think that you need to post a request in the 'Upgrade Requests' forum as well.

[jensa]

worried1, on 22 March 2012 - 06:04 PM, said:

I think that you need to post a request in the 'Upgrade Requests' forum as well.

What you should do in a couple of weeks is to get a friend calling the estate agent and saying they want to view the flat.

Then you'll find out if it is under offer or not.

I'm a bit suprised by a flat in need of modernisation having 6 bids on it, can't believe it really.

When we bought our flat in Kingston last year we got it for 243 when the original asking where 300. Lot of work was needed though to bring it up to "livable" standard.

[jensa]

worried1, on 22 March 2012 - 06:04 PM, said:

I think that you need to post a request in the 'Upgrade Requests' forum as well.

What you should do in a couple of weeks is to get a friend calling the estate agent and saying they want to view the flat.

Then you'll find out if it is under offer or not.

I'm a bit suprised by a flat in need of modernisation having 6 bids on it, can't believe it really.

When we bought our flat in Kingston last year we got it for 243 when the original asking where 300. Lot of work was needed though to bring it up to "livable" standard.

[nuki]

jensa, on 27 March 2012 - 11:41 AM, said:

What you should do in a couple of weeks is to get a friend calling the estate agent and saying they want to view the flat.

Then you'll find out if it is under offer or not.

I'm a bit suprised by a flat in need of modernisation having 6 bids on it, can't believe it really.

When we bought our flat in Kingston last year we got it for 243 when the original asking where 300. Lot of work was needed though to bring it up to "livable" standard.

6 bidders seems a lot to me too, and they all seemed to appear after the 2nd weekend on the market. The only rational explanation I could find -- the flat was undervalued. It's an estate sale, owner died, flat inherited by nieces.

This is the flat btw. Still doesn't have internal pics and it still says 'for sale'.
http://www.rightmove...y-22097547.html

[worried1]

anukis, on 27 March 2012 - 01:15 PM, said:

6 bidders seems a lot to me too, and they all seemed to appear after the 2nd weekend on the market. The only rational explanation I could find -- the flat was undervalued. It's an estate sale, owner died, flat inherited by nieces.

This is the flat btw. Still doesn't have internal pics and it still says 'for sale'.
http://www.rightmove...y-22097547.html

I don't know that area well enough to know if it is undervalued or not, but at first glance it seems quite cheap for that location.

6 bidders does seem strange, but at the same time I can't see why they would want to shake your interest if there were not other bidders. You made a sensible first bid to start with, so the normal EA reaction would be to see if they could get you to go up a bit rather than knock you back altogether.

[jcpricewatcher]

anukis, on 27 March 2012 - 01:15 PM, said:

6 bidders seems a lot to me too, and they all seemed to appear after the 2nd weekend on the market. The only rational explanation I could find -- the flat was undervalued. It's an estate sale, owner died, flat inherited by nieces.

This is the flat btw. Still doesn't have internal pics and it still says 'for sale'.
http://www.rightmove...y-22097547.html

Seems 'cheap' for the area, (in relation to other properties around). Kingston is stupidly expensive and it's a good price for a 2 bed flat within a few minutes walk of the town centre. Unfortunately for you, that 250k price is at a stamp duty threshold, and it's probably just within quite a few people's budgets so I can imagine the competition.
Kingston being a nice town within reasonable commute of London seems to attract numbers of affluent people who in turn drive the prices up.
I looked but eventually settled for something around 30 minutes away (still just within easy day out distance) rather than compromise too greatly on the property size.

Good luck with your house hunting and hope something else suitable does come up for you!

[russ023]

Some good basic advice here remember that thousands can be saved If done right.

[dtr74x]

worried1, on 09 March 2012 - 10:43 AM, said:

I'd agree in general, but you need to look at specific areas as well. The area of north Kingston between Richmond Road and the park is generally very nice, but certain parts of it are blighted by smaller council estates.

Grove Close is an interesting proposition. It is in an area of south Kingston called 'St Johns' which is a fairly well preserved Victorian district bounded by the Surbiton border in the south and Knights Park in the north. There is some modern infill (like Grove Close itself) but not that much social housing.

It is actually quite a long way away from the Cambridge Estate, but it is close to the University. I don't think that should be a massive problem, though, because Grove Close is not on a direct route from the campus to the Halls of Residence and there are no student pubs in that area.

The only problem for me with that area is that it is not particularly convenient for with Kingston or Surbiton, being at least a 20 minute walk from either town centre. This is not a massive issue as it is right on a bus route to both and only 5 minutes in the car, but I always think if you are living in a busy suburban area it is nice to be on top of all of the facilities that you need.

Of course, the upside of this is that you will get 2 bed flat for £250k that would cost you £100k more if you wanted to buy a similar onet a mile away in Surbiton.

What a snob!!! you do know kingston used to be made up of largly just working class people back in 60's,70's and 80's and even the 90's, and who either owned thier own home or was council, its bloody people like you, and all the other stuck ups with loads of money who are pushing up the silly prices making people who are 2nd or 3rd generation locals move out because they cant afford to live near family and friends anymore and ripping communitys apart, sick of rich people pushing out working class, this happened to fulham in the early 80's and now happening again in the surburbs of london after being forced out of fulham by the yuppies and over flow of kensington, its like a vicious circle, Makes me sick, theres so many really nice people who live in council propeties, some of my own family live in them, how dare you judge! how dare you, my family are NOT low life scum to be tarred with a same brush speaches on the internet by keyboard snobby over paid warriors, bloody snobs the lot of you who talk such utter rubbish!

[RichB]

dtr74x, on 22 May 2012 - 05:20 PM, said:

What a snob!!! you do know kingston used to be made up of largly just working class people back in 60's,70's and 80's and even the 90's, and who either owned thier own home or was council, its bloody people like you, and all the other stuck ups with loads of money who are pushing up the silly prices making people who are 2nd or 3rd generation locals move out because they cant afford to live near family and friends anymore and ripping communitys apart, sick of rich people pushing out working class, this happened to fulham in the early 80's and now happening again in the surburbs of london after being forced out of fulham by the yuppies and over flow of kensington, its like a vicious circle, Makes me sick, theres so many really nice people who live in council propeties, some of my own family live in them, how dare you judge! how dare you, my family are NOT low life scum to be tarred with a same brush speaches on the internet by keyboard snobby over paid warriors, bloody snobs the lot of you who talk such utter rubbish!

Whine whine whine.

The majority of us have already had to move away from friends and family to get a ******ing job in the first place. Sadly, the best part of friend to the scum Labour socialist government has made it almost mandatory to live in the suburbs to get a decent job.

You will also find that it is only the folk who were willing to borrow stupid amounts of money under said regime that pushed up the prices - though of course none of the long suffering locals would ever sell out to an outsider would they? Not while they lived in a dormitory town anyway.

[worried1]

dtr74x, on 22 May 2012 - 05:20 PM, said:

What a snob!!! you do know kingston used to be made up of largly just working class people back in 60's,70's and 80's and even the 90's, and who either owned thier own home or was council, its bloody people like you, and all the other stuck ups with loads of money who are pushing up the silly prices making people who are 2nd or 3rd generation locals move out because they cant afford to live near family and friends anymore and ripping communitys apart, sick of rich people pushing out working class, this happened to fulham in the early 80's and now happening again in the surburbs of london after being forced out of fulham by the yuppies and over flow of kensington, its like a vicious circle, Makes me sick, theres so many really nice people who live in council propeties, some of my own family live in them, how dare you judge! how dare you, my family are NOT low life scum to be tarred with a same brush speaches on the internet by keyboard snobby over paid warriors, bloody snobs the lot of you who talk such utter rubbish!

Erm, not quite sure how to answer that!

I fully appreciate that the vast majority of those who live on council estates are good people (I have a number of relatives who have/do live there as well), BUT the problem is that you can never tell who is going to be placed in them and it only takes a couple of bad people to make life a misery for those living in the vicinity.

I was just making the point that, if spending a set amount of money, Anukis might prefer to buy further away from one of the estates if possible.

I agree that Kingston was probably a lot more working class 20 years ago than it is now, that is evidenced by the type of housing in the centre. To be fair, though, you could say the same thing about Guildford, Tunbridge Wells etc. Kingston has always been a desirable area with a lot of solidly middle class neighbourhoods as well. As prices have rocketed, the people who would traditionally buy in those neighbourhoods have looked to the neighbouring areas rather than moving miles away.

The problem is the distribution of income has been skewed so much. The type of person in the income bracket who would have lived on Coombe Hill or the better parts of Esher in the 1970s is now priced out of that type of area, so will try to buy a detached Victorian villa in N. Kingston that might have been bought by a ‘middle manager’ 30 years ago. Those middle managers in turn have to look at semis and terraced houses that would have been bought by lower paid people 30 years ago. Anyone who is on any normal type of working salary is priced out altogether.

I don’t support this (I am not even in one of the higher income brackets mentioned!), but I think you will find it is happening everywhere in the SE, not just in Kingston.

[jensa]

And that brings us down to the fundamental question, what's needed for houseprices to fall properly in the SE ?
I would say the best favor the government can do is to start building on the greenbelts otherwise how are young
normal working people going to ever afford to move out of home.

I live in Kingston and me and my wife earns above 100k together and we still can't afford a house in N Kingston, I don't want to think how its then for a couple both having around 7pound/hour jobs,

[RichB]

Staines seems like the place to be in that case... where I'm hopefully off to. Commute will be harder, but the traffic generally a lot better. All the same progressively more dull shops with cheaper parking and less restrictions by the look of it.

[worried1]

jensa, on 24 May 2012 - 10:58 AM, said:

And that brings us down to the fundamental question, what's needed for houseprices to fall properly in the SE ?
I would say the best favor the government can do is to start building on the greenbelts otherwise how are young
normal working people going to ever afford to move out of home.

I live in Kingston and me and my wife earns above 100k together and we still can't afford a house in N Kingston, I don't want to think how its then for a couple both having around 7pound/hour jobs,

I'd say house prices are falling in the SE, unfortunately just not in the areas where you and I would like to live. Even within the borough, there are a lot of houses on the market way below the 2007 peak, but the problem is they are in Chessington and Tolworth, not North Kingston or central Surbiton.

We could build on the green belt, but what is to stop those areas becoming more like Chessington and Tolworth than Kingston and Surbiton? In fact, they may be worse still, because I can't see reasonable trnasport links being put in.

The problem is the inequality in income. There is not much money about in the economy as a whole and a lot of unemployment/part-time workers, but there are still plenty of people who do have good jobs and savings. There seems to be enough of these to fill all of the nice areas and that is keeping prices up. As dtr74x pointed out above, Kingston might not have been the area of choice for the rich years ago, but it is now as they are priced out of Richmond, Wimbledon Village etc.

The only thing that I can see hitting the market around here is interest rate rises. I doubt that the majority of buyers in the area earn that much more than you do, but they are prepared to take out massive loans to buy a place. With mortgage deals as low as they are now, they can easilty afford the repayments, but it would be a different story if the base rate went back up to 5%.

There are a lot of investment buyers, younger people using parental funds to buy and people who are on seriously good salaries, but I don't think there is enough of those on their own to keep prices where they are.

[worried1]

RichB, on 25 May 2012 - 02:00 AM, said:

Staines seems like the place to be in that case... where I'm hopefully off to. Commute will be harder, but the traffic generally a lot better. All the same progressively more dull shops with cheaper parking and less restrictions by the look of it.

I think that is a reasonable call. Kingston (the nicer parts at least) seems to have been caught in the London bubble, with loads of priced-out people from closer into SW London pouring money into the area and inflating prices. The ripple effect out to places like Staines has been much less so far, but won't be for long if this madness continues.

I saw a thread years ago where someone couldn't believe the prices of one-bed flats in their area had breached £100k and that this meant it had gone too far. My modern take on that is when standard 30's semis in the Kingston area reach £1m asking price. So far, there seems to be one on in Surbiton at £880k and one in Kingston at £925k. Where do people find that type of money for a house that was built to house a plumber or electrician?