snuffle_uk
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Posts posted by snuffle_uk
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Is it not covered by a 10 year NHBC certificate?
It is, but my thinking was that I'll be needing someone to identify defects for me in order for me to get the builder to fix them now? Else I risk more extensive and hence disruptive fixes later on, potentially after the certificate has expired (if they take a while to start causing real damage)
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The house I am going for is a six yr old 3 bed semi. I've read a fair few websites suggesting just the Homebuyers report for something so new, but read other websites where some denounce those reports as not being noncommittal where potential issues arise and rather superficial.
This is meant to be our home for decades so am tempted to try and get as many issues smoked out as early as poss, plus I'm a naturally paranoid sort anyway meaning I would suspect shonkiness in the build unless someone can reassure me otherwise. Structural survey might be worth the extra cost...
That where my thinking is at the mo... what are your thoughts, opinions, suggestions?
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My more paranoid side is edging me towards getting a local surveyor to do a proper structural survey on a property i'm buying, rather than the easy option of the mortgage-bank arranged Homebuyers Report.
Its a 6 year old 3 bedroom semi... perhaps a structural survey is overkill considering the age but I want to ensure as much as I can that there's nothing bad lurking there, rather than just wanting to get the transaction through with a minimum of fuss and effort!
so, does anyone have any recommendations for surveyors in the Cambridge area?
cheers in advance...
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I recommend shopping around for a mortgage that recalculates interest daily, not monthly. It means if you overpay they count your payment immediately, not a month later on repayment date - thereby saving you a month's interest on the amount you overpay by.
Daily interest is more common on interest only mortgage than repayment mortgages. So, I found it cheaper to take an interest only and pay it off than to take a repayment and pay it off.
Older mortgages were more often annual compounding, but they have largely gone away.
You may find a longer term gives you more flexibility to overpay or not, whereas a shorter term will lock you in.
Thanks for the heads up about interest recalculation, top info.
Your point about longer term & flexibility is spot on, that is what i was thinking of all along. Whilst childless i want to be able to overpay as much as possible, and then fall back to a lower mortgage commitment each month once i have a family to pay for! Unless doing so is more expensive for some reason, which TFW has shown it isn't
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There is very little in it.
Assuming 5% interest throughout the term and borrowing £100,000.00 -
Overpaying by £205.00 pcm for 15 years will redeem mortgage after you have paid £142,448.85.
Taking out a 15 year mortgage at 5% will redeem mortgage after you have paid £142,342.85.
Try the flexible mortgage calculator at Charcol for more comparisons.
Thanks v much :-)
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That depends on a lot of things, like whether you'd get a better rate going for a 15 year term than a 25 year one (or vice versa) and whether you'd pay more/less in fees etc. However the biggest thing it depends on is when you make the overpayments in your 25 year + overpayments scenario.
For ease of understanding, let's say you take out a 25 year mortgage, pay it for 15 years, then pay the rest as a lump sum. The payments you've made are smaller, so the outstanding debt higher, than with an equivalent 15 year mortgage. Therefore the overall cost will be higher, as interest is charged daily. That's the effect of leaving the "overpayment" until the end, but the earlier you make them the lower the cost will be.
So in answer to your question it depends largely on how much you overpay and how quickly. The cost of the loan i.e. the interest you pay depends on how much is outstanding at any given point, the quicker you pay if off the lower the cost of the loan.
Good points :-)
My question was under the assumption that the interest rate and the fees are the same. In that scenario, is paying a 25 year mortgage off (in its entirety) in 15 years by overpaying every month (e.g. no lump sum) equivalent in terms of cost to a 15 year mortgage?
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Apologies for a numptie newbie question!
If i took out a 25 year mortgage and paid it off in 15 years, would it have been any more expensive than mortgage arranged for 15 years in the first place? In my head they seem equivalent but i'm not sure if i'm missing something.
thanks in advance for you help...
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bump!
does anyone have any further suggestions since August? I may need to make some calls myself soon, so if anyone is able to add any firms that they recommend to the list in this thread then that would be appreciated
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does anyone know if the new coalition have said whether the three year rule on CGT is going to be scrapped - i'm referring to the rule that says as long as you had the property as your main residence at some point, then once you cease living there then next three years of ownership are treated as if it was your main residence (so exempt from CGT), even if you lived elsewhere and let the property out during those three years...
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Stevenage and Waterbeach are on the same railway line. I'd have thought it's a no brainer that you pick either Cambridge or one of the other stops between workplaces.
fair enough, but places with train stations in them that are handy for commuting don't tend to be affordable and pleasant. for an example, you just need to look at the villages between Cambridge and Stevenage (meldreth, shepreth, etc), i'd love to live there but lots of ex-london people have moved there due to the train to Kings Cross and Stevenage and pushed the prices up.
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If you work in Cambridge god help you if live in Huntingdon or St Ives and have to face the daily commute on the biggest car park in East Anglia - the Huntingdon to Cambridge stretch of the A14.
my current work is in Stevenage, and the person i would be living with works near Waterbeach. so its a case of finding a happy medium between the two which is also affordable (that seems to be the problem at the moment... which is why my thoughts have ventured out as far as St Ives!)
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Yep, Huntingdon and St Ives will be under water (physically, not metaphorically) in the fairly near future. Or not, depending on what happens with climate change. They're both very prone to flooding already. Having said that, I don't think that affects house prices very much. St Ives used to be very poor and run down but has definitely got a lot nicer in the last few years. Huntindgon is pretty much as it's always been, a bit scruffy, not too bad, not too good.
ah, good info about the flood risk. perhaps an impact on buildings insurance premiums to consider.
actually went for a look around St Ives yesterday... thought it was quite impressive size and quality of town centre considering its not the biggest of places. Seems the town is split into to the town centre at the bottom of it in the south and then the entirely residential bit thats north of the road that splits the town right thru the middle. the residential area seemed decent enough, nothing special but not too bad either... a reasonable place to live for a while.
then we went to huntingdon, i felt the residential area there seemed somehow bleak, didn't like it much, it just had a bit of a grim feel to it!
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hi folks, been doing some rightmove searches for possible purchases and it seems that 90% of the results of my low priced search are in Bar Hill... why?
hi everyone, thanks for your input on Bar Hill. yep, like most of us addicts i've been spending longer on rightmove and i've uncovered relative 'value' in St Ives and Huntingdon, which are connected by bus to Camb so not cut off (also Huntingdon has a rail station). Is it just distance from Cambridge that gives these places their keen-ish prices or is there (again) something i don't know about them? cheers, snuffle_uk
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hi folks, been doing some rightmove searches for possible purchases and it seems that 90% of the results of my low priced search are in Bar Hill... why?
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Its all snowballing (and not in the nice as seen on the internet way!)
well if the market was dead when the house went on the market and its still dead now then (with all due respect) how do you suppose the house sale is going?
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the media seems to be picking up pace like an avalanche
excuse me being dumb... what do you mean by that?
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One of the reasons that we chose to STR was that it allows us to live comfortably on one salary. Now we can start a family as soon as we decide to, rather than the far off point of "when we can afford it." We can still afford holidays, occasional meals out/take-aways. And we still have enough left over to keep saving more into our STR pot.
I totally see where you're coming from, and when (or if, lol) my place sells i'll most likely join you in renting for the forseeable future, to remove the need for a second salary. The only reason i originally mentioned a couple (or two mates) pooling salaries to buy together was to point out that 'the buyer has to be earning 55k to buy your flat' wasn't the only scenario out there.
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Oh - and bear in mind that an FTB nowadays is likely to need at least a 10% deposit in cash... + fees. So call it 13%.
Even of 'only' 300k that means they need to part with almost 40K before they get started on the affordability stakes - this in a time when the majority of people (apparently) are suffering under a heavy load of consumer debt.
Then they need to borrow 270k from somewhere. Even at a 5x salary multiple that means they will need to be earning around £54k. Even then the payments are going to be close to 2k a month.
can't argue with your maths, however remember that there would be more than one salary involved if/when my place was sold. a professional couple earning 27-30k each isn't all that rare... i'm pretty sure a singleton isn't going to be buying a three bedroom property. (if anyone knows if its not as simple as just adding up the two salaries, do say)
good point about the deposit required being a large wedge of cash in anyones book, but not everyone is up to their eyeballs in store-card debt. as long as nothing unexpected happens in a month i'm able to add a little to my savings each month and my salary is very unremarkable. also, there's more than one way to come by sums of money than just your salary (a canny investment, an inheritance, even just parents gifting the cash if the family is relatively well off)
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I for one would happily sacrifice a little space to not have someone living above or below me. In my old house I thought my neighbours were really loud, until I went to visit a friend's apartment. My friend's thought their upstairs neighbours were really quiet, but their upstairs neighbours going about their normal lives was much more intrusive than my incredibly loud next-door neighbours.
this, of course, depends on the people who live above or below you. Personally, we've never heard a whisper from the people who live below. But i take your point and others do share your opinion because we have had people who have looked elsewhere for this reason.
Also unless you are in a groundfloor flat your living-space doesn't lead directly to the garden, which is no good for letting small toddlers play outside while you are busy in the house.true on the garden point. agian, we've had people who have looked elsewhere for this reason.
It doesn't matter if your flat is slightly bigger than the houses, it is still worth less in most peoples eyes.which is why its got a lower asking price!
If your house has been on the market for the last month without offers it is over-priced. I sold my house recently and in less than 3 weeks I had 14 viewings and 4 offers, 1 from a cash-buyer which I accepted and sold for. If I hadn't gone under offer within the first month I would have knocked 5% off the asking each month until it sold. There are buyers out there who can buy, and if none of them are choosing to buy from you, your property is too expensive. It's that simple.i'd say its more a case that the people who can buy are those who actually have more than my flat is priced at in their pockets and choose to spend to their limits, e.g. buying entire houses. my opinion is that there is a shortage of people with much less to spend, to whom my flat would be a top option and an improvement on the 2 bed flats or houses miles away from public transport that they'd been looking at. i think that these are the people who are having trouble accessing finance, but if eventually these folks are able to come into the market (not guaranteed, i know), i think i'll see much more interest in my flat. it'll be more of a 'value proposition' for these types of people.
incidentally, we did have one offer very early on which was miles below the asking price (at the time) which we rejected... we're kicking ourselves now because it was at a level which we would happily accept now
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Realisticaly how many people are still looking - and able - to pay that kind of money for a flat outside zone 1?
There are seemingly still a handful of people looking for and able to pay more for houses that actually have less internal square footage
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For people from outside the SE, £300k+ would seem a massive amount of money for a flat of any kind.
As I saw mentioned in another thread earlier, the bricks and mortar is exactly the same in NE England as it is in the SE. I bet that you could buy a flat like yours for £100k in some areas of the north, and £300k would buy a large detached house.
true, true. i can certainly imagine £300k going a lot further than a flat in many other parts of the country.
perhaps a good plan is to buy a flat like mine for 100k up north and then move it brick by brick to Raynes Park?
(only works for top floor flats, lol)I think your flat seems quite well priced for the area (although I do not know RP that well), not least because the 3rd bedroom and the garden may make it attractive to those who want a house but cannot make that much of a leap in price. You also seem realistic about accepting less than the asking price, which may be important if the market around there is tanking as badly as it is in Kingston/Surbiton.Good luck with the sale.
Thanks worried1. to be honest, at the moment the viewings we're getting are people who can afford houses but want to see my place as an option... in the end they end up going for the houses because that's what they really want, and after all they can afford them.
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Not exactly what I meant, but fair enough.What I mean is that as far as spending a third of a million goes, I would expect more than that for the money
i'm not sure there are all that many ways to interpret 'it looks pretty dire', lol
but anyway, if you're expecting more than this for the money then i suggest you wait for prices to fall a lot, and come to terms with the fact that (under certain future circumstances) you may end up never getting onto the property ladder if you only ever want to pay what you perceive to be the 'right price' rather than the market rate for a property...
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Yes I could easily afford your flat, but frankly it looks pretty dire
lol, well, i really like it actually
if it doesn't sell then i'm more than happy to stay on until the market picks up again!one man's lunch is another man's poison etc
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However, I do disagree on how something get's catagorised as overpriced. It's all down to the market. If a property raises no interest and the people who view feel that they are not prepared to pay the asking price then I'd say it's overpriced (for the market). This is not dependent on whether they can or cannot afford it.
this is interesting. its impossible to refute what you're saying because you're right, it is a market and if buyers don't want to pay the going rate then there will be no deal. they way that you define 'overpriced' would apply here and i accept that.
as you recognise, the way i define overpriced is different and i do link it to the affordability of some. Without retracting or changing my initial sentiments of 'if its a price someone is able to pay and will eventually be inclined to pay given the right set of circumstances then its the right price' then i'd be happy to use a different term and leave 'overpriced' to be used in the context you give, because your definition does have integrity.
First Time Buyer Parental Assistance Mortgages
in All about buying, selling and mortgages
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there's mention of guarantor stuff on the scottish windows website, although i think it might be to do with a 'Professional Mortgage' intended just to lawyers, doctors, etc. worth you having a look though anyway