Heinz Beeny

Yes, you are so right, I wondered what is going on too. I have Rightmove property alerts to my Email and usually get one or two every few days BUT on Wednesday I got a list of 36 properties, 36! and they were all from the same local agent. I think he was relisting his entire stock, but the funny thing was, they were all "old" properties i'd already seen and surprise, surprise, they were all STILL at the same price, not one with a price reduction. Did he press the wrong button on his keyboard and relist them all by mistake or is something funny going on..........

Having worked for an EA, the lady had her property on the books for six months, and in this time, especially in the first few weeks, the EA will have run up costs such as man hours spent doing the photo's and measurements for the brochure, printing costs for brochure, postage, advertising costs in the local paper,cost of placing property on websites such as Rightmove, telephone costs, more man hours/petrol doing viewings. So I think that £300 quid is fair. Not that I am sticking up for EA's, in my opinion they are robbers in suits, but wanted to put forward a different slant. Incidentally, in Suffolk they charge you up front for the brochures, so you have to stump up £295 before they will even market your property, that plus the cost of a HIP (thank goodness they are no more!!), was a fair old sum to find up front.

The Masked Tulip, I suppose it does sound like we are lucky that we have a good amount of cash, but sadly we don't have my dear old Mum in Law anymore, and I know what I would rather have...

We sold this time last year, and went into rented. Our friends couldn't believe that in a "rising market" we were going to rent rather than buy and rather smugly told us that we would "miss the boat" and be priced out of the market. I must admit I did worry when prices did, indeed, keep rising for a few months. Funny, we don't discuss house prices when we meet anymore........

Good, finally people are waking up to the fact that they will not get top dollar anymore. We are in a similar position STR, top budget £700,000. We were encouraged by the Agent to view a property done up by a builder on at £825,000. Told the Agent it was well over our top line and he said that the seller knew it was way over and was just trying his luck. When we saw the house, it was nicely done, but easy to see it was way over, taking into account location, plot size and square footage we thought it was more of the £700,000 price mark. Because of our position as cash buyers and the way the market is headed we put in an offer of £650,000. Needless to say it was turned down, the Agent was ok about it and sdaid that any offer was better than no offers at all. What I can't understand though is why the Agent valued it at £825,000. As a point of interest, the highest price that has ever been achieved in that Road was £755,000.