roblpm

Jie Bie In the areas in Edinburgh in which I am looking there has not been one new property ont he market since December 1st! As I understand it if the property was ont he market before this it doesnt ever need a Home Report. So I may never find out!! It is amazing how the market has literally dies since December the 1st. The transaction numbers for December and January are going to be amazing! That is if we ever find out as the ESPC seems to have stopped publishing reports.

I suppose the only problem from the HPC point of view is that this is stopping people putting their houses on the market at all! No HPC if no houses sold at all??!!

fflump we are paying more than that at the moment due to a strange set of circumstances that meant we had to move in a hurry. However plenty of places now on for £1100ish so we will probably move (again!) in the summer. We have had roof problems in both the victorian places we have been in. I suppose if you owned it you could get a new roof! But also the windows are rubbish etc etc, I dont care but my wife does! I think the bungalows are more like 40s. This http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/1/1_around_edi...ank_cottage.htm indicates the farm was demolished in 30s?? Anyway they are not perfect either but more manageble I think. I hope to get an imaculately done up one with an extension for £350k eventually. There are a couple on the espc for FP £499k (needs some work, horrible conservatory) and FP 515k (immaculate). Not interested in offers of 35% off this yet!! We have tried! The other way to go is to get a completely unmodernised one. I think these will be down at £250k soon.

fflump We are still renting of course! Its a pain! However having rented a couple of these 100 year old terraces and seen the maintenance nightmare that they are, we are going buy a bungalow in greenbank, put double glazing in it and live happily ever after! Better gardens too so the kids can live outside! Going to wait another year at least though. dances with sheeple I dont know that they are sliding down the hill, have just heard rumours!

Fflump I consider myself an expert on Comiston Drive!! Couple of things to consider: The one nextdoor went for £485k similar condition 6th Sept 2007. Then failed to sell at £565k, I think it is probably rented now. But more relevant we looked at loads of them over the last few years, 67 went for £450k in 2006! We looked at it, it was in reasonable nick and on at at FP 475k, people didnt want it at that price and then it went for £645k in January 2008!! That wasnt in the same condition as 45 and 47 at all, was in ok move in condition. I suppose the inflated price may include a new kitchen and bathrooms? Interestingly 67 went for £350k in 2003, no idea of the condition then though. So all that has happened is a massive bubble in the prices since 2006 (and before). This is going to take ages but should be below those prices sooner or later. If you are desperate offer them £350k and do it up yourself! There is also the question whether the houses on the south side of comiston drive suffer from subsidence as there is a river running behind them at a much lower level and the house are maybe sliding down the hill!

Crikey............................ This is more excitement than I have seen for many moons in the Scotland subforum. Welcome HM!!!! (ccc keep calm he is winding you up on purpose!) Anyway you are very welcome HM to the forum but you are also very wrong. We sold in 2004 in London and moved to Edinburgh in 2005. Undoubtably had we held on in London we would have been better off, the place we sold for £390k was sold for £580k in 2007!! However that would have meant timing the top of the market perfectly which is nigh on impossible and interestingly the market was stalled in london in 2004. Where you are double wrong HM is that we had an offer accepted on a place in Greenbank in 2005 which we pulled out of (dont let anyone say you cant do this in scotland!!). The equivalent house to that is now probably about 10% cheaper and I'm sure will get cheaper still. In the meantime we have been renting and paying the rent easily from the interest (after tax) on the money we have in the bank so no loss there. So although a year or so ago I thought we might be doomed I now think we will be better off than if we had bought then.

Its absolutley remarkable how dead the market is! I can't see how the agents are still in business?! My search area: Braids, Greenbank and Morningside show about 3 changes is PB since the start of December. Roll on the spring for some more overpriced properties coming on the market and not selling!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/do...mp=False#dnaacs Get commenting!!

Ta, if only my every wish was granted as fast!

Link to property?? For us bystanders??

Anyone feel like emailing a tame journo with "housing figures so bad espc has stopped producing figures" kind of story?? Anyone know who to email and I will do it?!

Any brainboxes care to comment on how we go forward from here with last year's figures dropping out of the figures and seasonal adjustments?? Are the next months likely to be bad?? Also the graph on page 2 on the graph prices vs earnings we have only gone from just under 6.5 to just over 5.5?? Still a long way to go?? Or have wages really been rising that much??!!

ccc, actually the guy told me that this system was starting not to work any more due to the fact that the surveyors are getting nervous I think! I think this has been going on for ages but now the valuation price is coming down to meet the BMV price. Funnily enough it also seems in this game that it is the surveyor taking the risk really not any of the others. I wonder if the banks are going to ever bother getting the valuations investigated. You can imagine a BTL landlord getting reposessed and the bank getting back much less than 50% of the original bogus valuation.

ccc, works something like this: Company A finds "BMV" property, say vendor agrees to sell for 50k. Company A finds investor who will pay 52.5k for it. Surveyor values at 70k. Company buys at 50k sells to investor for 70k Investor gets 75% BTL mortgage of 52.5k. Company A gives investor 17.5k back, retains 2.5k as fee. Investor has property with no upfront money!

Radge, just to reassure you, we put in an offer 35% under a fixed price last monday, we are cash buyers, but vendor not interested at all! Someone I know in a property dealing company in edinburgh told me they are doing this every day on 10s of properties, between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 was biting at the moment according to him.

Not enough forced sellers yet to bring prices down generally. People are waiting for the bounce!

Aha, meltsheep, do you have kids? Catchment areas etc??!! And 18 months ago there was no choice in unfurnished 3-4 bedroom houses in our area. Anyway there is plenty of choice now! However our contract runs until August. So its either rental property number 4 in 5 years or someone sells us a house for 35-40% off the fixed price!

Aha, you havent met my wife! No control over repairs, house needs a lot of maintenance and so trades people in and out, leak in the roof etc etc!

Thanks scunnered but I finally found a series somewhere (forgotten where) I will post when I find it again! In the meantime can someone volunteer to email David Smith at the ESPC and ask where the November sales report is?? I'm not his flavour of the month! We just offered 33% off a fixed price for a house and were told to naff off! Wife is despereate to get out of rented but vendors not realising whats happening yet. Apparantly they are not in a hurry to sell!!

Folks Does anyone have to hand an easily distilled price index for edinburgh for the last say 8 years, either monthly or quarterly? Reason is so I can make a spreadsheet that I can show the wife!! Then I can say right we are aiming for buying at 2002 prices, plot a sold price from say 2004 and then calculate at what price we would be happy buying it at. Any offers? myhouseprice has nice graphs but only back to 2005, ESPC reports only back to 2006, Registers of Scotland looks like I will have to go through each quarterly report. Any offers??

In terms of safety, I should imagine that Morningside where I live now has one of the lowest crime rates of any city suburb in the world?! The local bobby even puts a list of all the crimes in the Neighbourhood watch newsletter and it isnt very long! My previous 3 abodes were Bermondsey, Camden and Brixton in London. There is no comparison!

Not that I am a builder but I think you are mad! 2 examples: 2007-08-07 2 Greenbank Rise, Edinburgh, EH10 5RW £250,000 http://www.espc.co.uk/Buying/266544.html Now on for sale at FP 395k having been renovated. Has been on the market for months so obviosuly aint gonna get 395k. I have no idea what the renovation costs are but stamp duty on 250k is £2500, finance on £250k must be £12.5k, plus legal fees you gotta be looking at 20k before you have done anything? If it costs 80k to do up then you looking at no profit. I suppose if you do it yourself so save all the labour you might make 40k for a years work?? But very risky in a falling market. These houses were going for 250k done up a few years back! BTW the one next door is available! http://www.espc.co.uk/Buying/272197.html Another one: 2007-09-06 47 Comiston Drive, Edinburgh, EH10 5QS £485,000 Failed to sell at offers around £560k and is now rented I think. Next door is now on sale for FP 440k http://www.espc.co.uk/Buying/270125.html You would need to buy very cheaply and then sell for 30% less than the prices on the espc at the moment. Nothing is shifting at the asking prices on the ESPC.

And funnily enough I'm not sure there were any new properties on the ESPC this week at all!!

Bjorn I am not a BTLer. I have once had a btl flat which was our flat which we rented out while we bought another flat for a few years. Sold the lot in 2004. Might buy a flat to let out in the future, but hardly qualifies as a BTLer! The reason I mentioned the rental yield is that as far as I can see there are 2 pointers to a property's value other than the market price. One is how much money you can borrow to buy it, ie multiples of average salaries, and the other is the rental yield. All I know is that when I bought a flat in London for £94k in 1998 you could easily get £9400 a year in rent for it. So that leads me to believe that property is still overvalued compared to this and when the rental yield is around 10% we are at values equal to the late 90s? How would you know what a house is worth other than the market price? Which in a bubble is a bubble price? How will any of us ever decide to buy?

Have to say its a much more appealing prospect than all the ones down at Leith/Granton Found this: http://www.jennersproperty.com/tenants/detail/P00173 Which looks to be the same sort of thing for rent at £850 a month So if you got 850 rent (doubtful) and got it for £165k thats a gross yield of 6.2%. Which isn't as bad as some I have seen. Still not the 10% that anyone sensible would be looking for.