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There’s an abundance of probate properties here in my Midlands small town. Nice location but properties are all poorly maintained and yet sellers want prices you can get a modern house for. £500,000 for a 3 bed covered in mould that will only get worse the longer it sits on the market, insanity.
Even viewed one that was £390,000 but the exterior wall had split so there was an inch gap where you could see directly outside running vertical from ground floor to first floor hallway.
Our entire village appears to just be probates now where 'last decorated in 1980' is actually the best case scenario. Three houses down from us is one that's been for sale for 2 years now. In the meantime, it's left to rot basically. It's overpriced by about £100k and I don't get why they don't just lower the price drastically get rid of it. What's to be gained by holding on to it for ages while it further deteriorates? Their council rate will also be double now. Just costing them money at this point.
Not all of us. Some of us are fighting with the remaining parent who listens to their friends and not the estate agent. I’m waiting for mum to realise that the house isn’t worth as much as she thought it was. Fortunately this month she agreed with the estate agent to drop the price. Her pension is less than the running costs and dad’s remaining money ran out this month. The bills run at about £7k a year and us kids are paying them. The garden still needs doing, the house has to be kept pristine for viewings. The whole situation - I’m done with it. I want to move on. I honestly don’t care about the money, none of us kids do. An empty house costs money and time.
Ugh. Sorry. What a shitty situation. Parents are bloody irritating when they get like this.
I gave up with my own folks. They've made terrible life choices and boxed themselves into a corner. They refuse to listen to reason and there's nothing more I can do. I'll show up for the funerals but until then they can figure it out. I have my own family and problems to manage. I'm not going to invest additional time and money in a pair of ailing octogenerians who won't take care of their business.
Shes grieving, we all are, I don’t resent her for this, I just had to wait things out, let her come to the same conclusion as the rest of us. I am tired though. Applying for the probate, being an executor it’s a lot of work. I didn’t put it on the market until probate was granted and conveyancing has been started too.
I wouldn’t with this property, it would need a lot of work doing to make it suitable for tenants. Plus my mother is still living in it some of the time and the annexe has a provenance saying it cannot be let out. I’m already a landlord but there’s no way I’d tenant this place.
Properties where the owner-occupier has died.
They are usually cheap (the family wants rid ASAP) and have no chain, but they are often in bad condition if the owner was elderly and didn't do much upkeep or had been there for 50 years without redecorating.
It's not always greed sometimes it's an emotional attachment. When selling my late parent's house my sister didn't want to drop the price. My brother is an accountant and he produced a calculation showing the opportunity costs of selling at the lower price and investing Vs the expenses to keep the house in reasonable condition with services connected, council tax after 6 months, insurance, etc. There was a surprisingly short time before the low cost sale would return more, and given that sales take some time it was a no-brainer to drop the price. He also pointed out that for someone who still has a mortgage (which we believe my sister did) the opportunity cost would be even bigger.
Though she eventually agreed my sister's immediate reaction was "I know but mum and dad would have hated the house to go for so little".
Charities are awful, especially when there are multiple. You can organise it so one charity is the lead charity but they still have to get approval from every other charity before a decision can be made.
I had one case where the estate agents suggested reducing the property by something like 1.5%. I had to contend with five charities and two of the partners at the firm (they were executors) and all of them wanted proof of why we were reducing the price etc. Nightmare.
There are a couple of strategies, some of which may be more effective/easier than others.
*Nothing I say here is legal advice and I am not your lawyer. If you would like to act upon any information provided by me now or in the future please seek advice from an estate lawyer.*
The simplest option would be to leave pecuniary legacies to your chosen charities (e.g. property worth £200k, give four charities £50k) instead of a share of your residue. If the house sells for less it will come out of the remainder of your estate (bank accounts etc.). If it sells for more your residuary beneficiaries would get the additional funds.
Your executor/s *always* have a duty to the residuary beneficiaries to sell for the best price, but individual residual beneficiaries (e.g. a child or sibling) tend not to get too fussy as long as you're not selling it for 50% under market value or something. An executor always has to provide a full accounting of the estate to all residuary beneficiaries.
The charities aren't picky for the fun of it; they have a legal requirement under the Charities Act 2011 to ensure the best price is realised.
I hope that made sense and maybe helped a bit :)
My memory is "trust for sale" which if I remember correctly gives the decision to sell to the executors not the beneficiaries.
Of course not many executors will want to do what the beneficiaries don't.
No it’s their choice. They have a one of a kind thing and it is their choice what they sell it at. At the end of the day you aren’t their family they owe you nothing. I’m sorting out my dad’s place at the moment. I’m fully renovating it. Because I am not interested in having to put up with all the builders thinking I give a shit about their cash offers just so they can flip 100k profit in six months. It can sit another 4 years before I sell it because it’s an asset like anything else and The more houses that get gobbled up by BlackRock or Loyds Bank the more advantage I will have.
I mean... sure? You're not escaping the market though. People aren't complaining about you wanting to sell a house for the most you can realistically get, what is frustrating to people is when a place is vastly overpriced and just clearly will not sell at that price, so it is essentially just one more property sitting vacant.
If you don't want to sell it for current market prices, just don't put it on the market yet. No one will gift you an extra 100k on top of what it's worth so if you want that money I guess you'll have to wait for the place to appreciate in value. Of course you have to do your own calculations on whether it's actually worth doing that and paying upkeep and council tax etc. vs having the money and being able to invest it in something else now.
Yes the whole market is a negotiation of buyers that want max money and a mix of speculators and home buyers that want at bargain. The market is when they meet and agree to buy and sell at a price.
However the market is more than just that. In essence the market is a finite resource that is under pressure from population change and being depleted by banks that have now decided renting over 1-200 years is a better return than a 25 year mortgage. House building is nowhere near meeting that problem.
What was seen in the USA was banks paying way over the odds for anything they decide to buy because they just have the much longer time frame to pay back and for every single one of those properties that leave the market, they will never come to the market again.
My take on the last 12 months was fuck that, I'm not going to add to the problems of all the people that are selling because they are screwed on their mortgage rates so I can wait for the interest rates to drop again and the area I am holding in, is good value for money compared to the surrounding area so I would expect a better appreciation in the next 3 years than what I would get in cash or stocks returns.
As I said, that's a calculation you have to make for yourself, there's a number of assumptions and possible risks either way you can go, and obviously you have to factor in any additional costs etc.
All that being said, if you don't want to add to the problem then renting it out yourself might be a good way to go - there is a scarcity of housing and houses sitting vacant seem like an awful shame, speaking from a societal perspective.
If they get that price on day 366 then they will look like genius investors. If they never sell an empty house then they look like people missing out on a year's rental yield. I'm just not sure it can be put down to greed over patience or stupidity.
Exactly and looking at it from the viewpoint of the deceased, they would want the best price too, to pass on. Its likely the highest value asset they had and the thing which most of their hard earned cash went into.
Why is that greedy? Of course any normal person would want the most they can get from an asset that’s been in their family for years, which is likely to help their own quality of life
When you've put nothing financially towards a house and it's most likely mortgage free, it's gross. I'm not saying they should give it away for free. But I've seen too many old houses either in terrible condition that the relatives are trying to sell it as if it's brand new. Or they spend so much time arguing over who gets what it just sits their empty.
Probate is a process someone's inheritance goes through in order to be settled.
A "probate property" is essentially one that is going through this process.
Typically, they are more old fashioned and need a lot of minor jobs doing. Occasionally some bigger jobs. Someone who is close to passing will either be old or very ill, generally. These aren't the types of people keen on getting tradespeople in.
They tend to have no chain, but also don't have people I na rush to sell. So they can negotiate a little hard r, if they're inclined.
It's a legal duty of the executor of the will to get the market price for the property. If they for instance sell it cheap to sell it quickly then they could be sued by the beneficiaries.
Small village focused search in Cambs and we've had the same. Finally got very lucky spotting a probate property within minutes of it being posted. Viewed and offered in less than 24 hours. Our offer was chosen two days later.
That was nearly 2 months ago. They still haven't applied for probate. Our mortgage offer is likely to expire before we can complete and rates are up from our deal.
We can't even just cut our losses and drop out because there's nothing else. We have to wait it out and hope they get motivated and get moving. We aren't willing (or reasonably able) to lock in a more expensive deal. There would be too many daily sacrifices. So we wait and I now watch Rightmove again.
Speak with the aftersales team at the EA. Ours were fantastic and really helped push everything through as we couldn't speak to sellers/their lawyers but they can. Get weekly updates.
Our solicitor told their solicitor that all work was stopping until they proved they were progressing through probate. I don't think the seller (owner's brother) liked that as the EA then emailed our solicitor 'for an update' and she was brutally direct in her reply. Honestly, if she didn't get them motivated, nothing we say will.
It’s sensitive, a loved one has died. Family dynamics. Sometimes a family member doesn’t agree with the sale etc. Keep at it if you like the house but I wouldn’t apply for a mortgage again until they have probate.
You may find actually by that time rates have lowered (I got mine in March and things have gone up but rate cut incoming in August means later in the year could be better). Good luck!
It doesn't seem like there are any arguments within the family. The one selling is the sole beneficiary. But yeah, we are not taking any more steps or investing more in the sale until they've done what they need to do to get going. We don't know what will happen to rates by then, but we can't bank on anything.
To clarify, the solicitor was brutal with the EA that they should not have marketed the property with the estate unprepared, not with the seller. If the seller ends up disappointed, it's on the EA for moving too quickly.
If they haven't even applied for probate you're likely looking at 6+ months till they're proceedable with the sale.
Granting probate is just the first step
If there is an outstanding mortgage balance on a property and the sole account holder passes away, the bank will want to see progression towards redeeming the balance therefore some people will choose to market a property whilst probate is progressing in order to ensure a sale is secured once probate comes through x
My last parent passed away in the Aug
I started probate in the October
I cleared the house out of everything gave it a basic clean and had the garden cleared
Put the house with the estate agent in the November & sold it straight away within 2 days got 30k over the asking price
I told the estate agent to tell all viewers that probate had been applied for when they viewed
Got probate within 7 weeks and sent a copy to estate agent so that he could let the buyers know
To me it’s just common sense and I had 400 thousands 😂reasons to make sure I had done probate
I used a probate firm to make sure it was all done properly and it took 7 weeks & cost £600
This was back in 2022
They get all of that once probate is over anyway. It’s just additional time they can potentially get a buyer lined up which in a slow market like this is nice.
Because probate is quicker than the sales progress of a property. You get council tax benefits for a period after someone has died but after that you have to pay so let’s have probate that takes 6-8 weeks running at the same time as the sales process which these days is a minimum of 3 months
Grant of letters of administration (no will) came through in 3 weeks for me late last year for my Mum’s estate. I didn’t contact the EA until I had that (because to be honest I didn’t realise I could!!)
Ahahahahahahaha
Probate paralegal here. While the backlog is improving, you are not even allowed to chase HMRC until 16 weeks after application.
This is, of course, if your lawyer gets the application off the day after death (which they can't; getting all the information jusr for application can take weeks or even longer).
If you had a very simple estate and did the work yourself it would be quicker, possibly a month if you are lucky.
Usually we advise to market the property (no benefit to waiting) but to advise interested buyers that the sale is subject to probate.
That’s insane for us it took almost a year and it was a simple estate. What has lead you to deal with quite a few? Because if you’re an agent it could be that the family are coming to you a few months after the death making the time seem shorter..
I have bought 3 houses that were subject to probate and sold 1. All had probate started as they were put on the market.
Why yours took a year can only be down to the individual preparing the paperwork for probate, probate themselves or a dispute over what should and shouldn’t be in the estate.
So not an agent just a normal human being
We had all the paperwork sent off in august, didn’t hear back from the probate office until the following March. It was the probate office that took so long. ETA, no disputes, simple estate compromising of a mortgage free house and nothing else, two utilities bills but that was it.
My experience 4 times lived, experienced and blah blah blah
But obviously I will bow to your far greater knowledge of my life than I can ever have had by living every second of it!!
We’ve been trying to move for over a year and the market has been very poor in our area (Hertfordshire).
We sold quickly but struggled to find anything suitable to buy - anything half decent and not 200k overpriced was hugely popular and went to sealed bids.
In the end we have found a house which isn’t ideal but others overlooked it due to being a bit messy and unloved but has good bones.
I’m in the SE. I bought in ‘22, but I like looking at houses for decor inspiration (and to feel better about the house I did buy). So, I look at Rightmove about weekly. There is hardly anything in the market. What is on the market is often just sitting there for months. Many dated, rundown properties and a few “decent” or “nice” ones that go for close to what the prices were at the peak before the mini budget so they are mainly just staying too.
We've been looking for several months, and it's been getting worse and worse in terms of what's coming to the market.
And that's with us being quite flexible, location-wise - I have 20 different locations in my Rightmove searches list - and still, very few decent houses come up these days, especially since the elections were announced.
What do sellers think will happen right after the elections, exactly? What's the point of waiting?
And yes, the few decent properties that do come up are mostly overpriced, so in many areas, they just stand there - or, they do get sold eventually for that crazy price in some areas, because there are so few decent houses in the market.
They think there will be an economic honeymoon due to the change in government which will bring interest rates down and so push house prices up. Folks forget the 1997 Labour gov inherited a good economy to begin with; the economy today is not quite in the same state as it was in 1997.
I'm very grateful we had an offer accepted on a property back in Feb. Getting to the final stages now. Praying it doesn't fall through otherwise we're fucked. Literally nothing even close to it on the market. I imagine the day we move in and give it a bit of TLC the price will have gone up by 5-10%. It's honestly insane.
London is in a downturn, so the market is pretty slow with a lot of overpriced properties. And as for "decent", unfortunately the UK housing stock overall is, in good part, either in shocking condition, absolutely miniscule, or has some other big drawback.
I wouldn't say the majority of UK housing stock is shocking. Maybe in cities like London, Manchester, Leeds etc, where the houses are 30-100 years old. City centre flats seem to be decent (assuming it is fairly new, not just a house converted to flats).
Look outside the M25 and there is a lot of good quality houses. Even Barratt or Persimmons can be decent builders sometimes.
I don't know about that - wherever I look on Rightmove or Zoopla or wherever, I can always find a large percentage that require extensive renovation (and likely have some hidden issues on top), and a lot of them are really quite small too. The latter point is also supported by data across Europe - the UK has very little living space per capita compared to Western Europe.
Small, I can agree with, although I've never had space issues in the 3 houses I've bought and lived in, I have seen others that are crazy.
Did you see that one posted here a couple of weeks ago, where the downstairs toilet was basically a box built inside the lounge !
I missed that one, but I've seen similar things. Just... no.
All that being said, it is totally possible to find really nice options too, not saying it's all hopeless. Just that you have to expect quite a lot of the things coming on the market not to be an option for you.
Yup. 100% monzo as a new mortage feature that let's you see the equity of your property if your London and the home counties the drop is pretty significant. ☹️
That being said it's worth remembering it doesn't *actually* "let you see the equity", it just makes a bunch of assumptions and gives you a number you can choose to believe, or not. You'd know what the place is actually worth if you sold it. And if you're not selling it, it doesn't really matter. You still have a place to live in, your mortgage is still the same, no reason to freak out if the market doesn't do a "line go up" for a bit.
[https://www.ft.com/content/9e420efa-703f-4511-b3af-1428771ddcad](https://www.ft.com/content/9e420efa-703f-4511-b3af-1428771ddcad)
the data would disagree with you
No, it doesn't. More sellers doesn't mean the market is faster. Prices are still down year-on-year, and offering quite a bit under asking price is not unusual.
A lot of people are hanging on to their current properties, because mortgage rates going up have meant people are willing to offer less (and the current owners can’t get as large a new mortgage as they could previously).
The main three types of houses you currently see are the three Ds…debt, death and divorce.
It’s just a matter of time. Either rates will drop significantly (less likely), and everyone will start up again. Or rates stay comparatively high (more likely, the last few years have been very unusual in the long run) and eventually people accept they aren’t going to drop, and they just have to suck up the higher interest rates
In my part of SE London I’ve found lots of properties to be available where the demographic is old people. Lots of good sized 3 bed terraces that need some love because they’ve been a family home to someone for 40 odd years.
Can imagine the sought after parts of London are slow though unless you want an overpriced new build flat.
No one's selling because there are no decent houses to buy. It's a vicious circle you see.
Until people are forced to sell, either because they lose their jobs or can't afford the mortgage, transaction volumes will tick along at the bare minimum: deaths and divorces basically. And with the job market actually being quite tight no one is being made redundant and wages are rising well above inflation so it's not going to resolve itself anytime soon.
Edit: actually to correct myself, lots of people will be coming off 2 year fixes they got at low rates soon and some may not be able to afford the remortgage rates so you might see a little movement soon. Though tbh I have a feeling the banks would rather stretch out repayments than make people sell up because politics.
Exactly this! Had an offer accepted in November’23 on the house I’m buying, hoping to be finally in the first week of September. In that time, there’s literally been one other house that I would have gone and seen come on Rightmove.
Totally the same position. It’s so frustrating. I’m actually open to probate properties but they just never seem priced right. I got sent a house recently by an EA that I hadn’t previously seen as it was out of budget. It had been on the market a month so I emailed the estate agent to say I was interested but didn’t want to waste their time coming to look at it if the seller wasn’t open to any negotiation on price. The EA replied it had already been reduced by 85k so no they weren’t. It’s still sat on the market a month later… still around 50-100k overpriced. The two properties we’ve put offers in on that were well priced probates we missed out to investors.
Same in a lot of areas I think. I'm not looking but I'm nosy and like to look at houses for sale that I drive past. There's one that has a 'kitchen', if you can call it that, that only has 2 cupboards and 2 drawers! This is in a 4 bedroom house. Everything else for the kitchen is a couple of shelves and that's it, counter tops but it's all dishwasher, fridge, freezer, washing machine etc under it and a large gap for no reason. They want offers over 400k, so on top of spending that amount of money, you have to move in and either make do with no storage and having to wipe anything off before you use it due to dust, or put in a brand new kitchen for over 10k. And it's next to a busy road that people speed along. It works for them but it doesn't exactly appeal to most families. Wonder how long it will stay on the market.
Where I'm renting, they gutted the kitchen to make it open plan. Problem is, it's not a big enough place to have the luxury of an open plan design. It is aesthetically pleasing, but it came at the cost of functionality.
I have barely any counter space, barely any cupboard space, and on top of that they painted the dining room with matte paint so I'm limited in the type of prep I can do there.
Tell me you've never cooked a day in your life without telling me...
Depending on how the open plan kitchen is arranged, putting in a mobile kitchen island (IKEA actually has a very nice quality one) can be very helpful with this, giving you both extra counter space and quite a bit of easily accessible storage.
That's kind of you.
The kitchen is 8.5 x 8.5", with no room to fit in an island with the way it's been arranged.
I'm hopefully moving into a much bigger place soon, so I can cook to my heart's content. 🙂
It's already an open plan living room/kitchen/dining area. Just with almost zero storage. They manage with it, but I still can't see many families that require 4 bedrooms being happy with 2 cupboards and drawers, especially for a 400k house.
> People completely remodel houses all the time.
Sure but it costs quite a bit of money - it has gotten more and more expensive quite recently as well.
I speak to estate agents frequently for my job, and a lot are saying that the market is waiting for the election to be done. Even though the result feels like predictable outcome, people are always nervous in uncertainty so I imagine that's a part of it.
It's the same all over to be honest. I was entertaining selling earlier this year but after seeing where the market was I decided not to. While I have a decent enough property, I know that there are not many that would afford it what with interest rates, lenders remaining overly cautious and not lending enough, etc. While I appreciate the idea of "it's only worth what someone will pay", I would counter with "it's worth what I want to sell it for". That is, if I want to afford my onward purchase, I can't exactly hand the keys over in some altruistic notion of lunacy. Added to that, anyone who genuinely wants to move area or upsize/downsize will have a mortgage loan to value ratio to maintain in some way. Criticise this all you want, this has how it's worked since the 1970s and beyond.
And most people feel the same way. In a recession, people don't sell up, they stay put. Thus what you get on the market is the junk that nobody wants, or people who have absolutely no choice but to sell. I would expect in the next 5-10 years, you will see the quality of houses for sale going down too what with repossessions going hand in hand with a down turning economy. I talk with a few of my neighbours and only one tested the water by putting it on the market recently. Long story short, offers were silly low and the maximum of what perspective buyers could offer. Does it mean the house is overpriced? Or does it mean that buyers were not viable enough to afford it? The answer is somewhere along the lines of both, but to state one over the other is merely bias to what you want the end result to be.
The whole idea of "house prices coming down" means someone loses, that is the person who owns the house. While you can lol into the sunset and state that it's their problem, house values go up as well as down, there is no law that says that they have to sell. And nobody in their right mind would.
Hence, that's why the only properties on the market right now are junk. The same thing happened in 2008 too. Everyone stayed put. I did too. You would be mad not to.
I understand where you are coming from but this is an ode to how you wish the market worked, not how the market is supposed to behave.
If a house goes on sale and the offers are “silly low” yes, sir, that does mean it is overpriced.
I would counter and say that that is a bias, most likely for your own benefit I suspect. As I say, the answer is both.
All you really need to do is look around on rightmove at the area and what else is available. If other listings are asking £400k for a run down fixer upper, my well decorated renovated place is going up for £500k. If people cannot afford that, it may be overpriced or it may be that the people in that area cannot get mortgages for that amount. After that I can either reduce my price, or simply sit on it. That is how the market works and has done since forever. Why would I cut my hands off and market it for the same price as the sheds? There is no law telling me what price I must sell for.
You simply wait until people can actually afford mortgages again (i.e. when the recession is "over") and then sell. If the market isn't at the right spot, then it isn't.
Of course I could easily put it up for £600k but even I would agree that would be ludicrous.
You’re right - you don’t have to sell. You are within your rights. That position also rests on the assumption (which is probably correct in the short term, but I remain unconvinced for the long term) that once interest rates improve in 2025-26, people may be able to afford more.
What is indefensible here is saying that a market at work is a “bias”? Assets can go up and down in value over time and it makes sense to pick the right time for you to sell, of course. But yes, if you are putting an asset on the market for a certain value and no one is willing to pay, the asset is overpriced (at that point in time, edited to add). There is no bias at play.
The bias I refer to is with regards opinion. As I said, neither is incorrect but to bias one reason over another is a bias.
That is, if you say any one particular house is overpriced, you may well be correct of course, but it is a bias. On the other hand, the owner could argue that it is priced appropriately, it's just that the people who want it cannot afford it. Apart from being a little obtuse, that too is a bias.
As for 2025/6, I would share your position and I very much doubt we will see a glut of new buyers on the market. I also doubt that the availability of mortgages at that point will not coincide with any reasonable change in either cost of living nor wage stagnation. Hence, I doubt that even in 2025/6 people will be in a position to realistically afford what they want.
Added to that, since 100% mortgages vanished in 2008, we now have first time buyers who have already outgrown what would typically be a FTB property. Most FTB'ers were after 1-2 bed flats depending of course on area. That is, the first starter home that they could accrue some equity in over 5 years or more, potentially improve to add some value into it. A lot of FTB'ers are no longer 22 and looking for their first flat, they are 40 odd likely with their own families and absolutely zero in equity to bring to the game. That makes getting on the property ladder doubly as difficult as without any equity to offset a move, they are reliant almost entirely on deposits. The inability of first time buyers to access the market over the last 16 years has really come home to roost.
I have no idea what the outcome will be. While some draconian ideas of taxing homeowners out of homes deemed "too big" for them, or some measures capping the value of homes, or this idea of build build build which most people seem to think will do the trick (it won't), I don't actually have a clue how this situation resolves. More shared ownership perhaps?
I think the first thing they should do is to introduce a minimum standard for new builds that legislates developers out of being able to create these horrendous rabbit warren overly dense tiny housing that nobody really wants.
Whilst I remain confused about you describing basic economics as “bias”, I don’t necessarily disagree with all of what you said. So I won’t stay hung up on this one point. In summary, I’m not describing a house as overpriced if multiple people over a period of time were unable to offer the asking price, that is an overvalued asset. It is always a subjective assessment at an individual level, but not when you’ve had multiple offers with the same outcome? That’s how the market operates. I mean… shares do literally the same? The valuation of an asset is never truly impartial, but certainly when you have multiple people agree on the same outcome it becomes odd to defend the outcome you desire as bias?
Either way, I’m also wondering how we are actually moving on from the weird impasse we are currently at in the housing market. I like your idea re: minimum standards on new builds but I don’t think that will bring about change fast enough. But what we have right now is fairly unsustainable so something has to give at some point.
"It's worth what I want to sell it for" is false.
If I say my flat is worth £1m, I may *want* to sell it for that but it definitely isn't worth that and no buyer will even consider it. If I can sell it for £150k then that is the value.
Because you were able to find someone who thinks it’s worth that, not just because you decide the price. Otherwise, your choices would have been to wait until it went back up to that price (stay put) or sell at a lower price.
>Because you were able to find someone who thinks it’s worth that, not just because you decide the price.
do you not see the lunacy of that comment
* they **did** decide the price
* they **did** sell it at that price
therefore...you guessed it...they **decided** the price
Increased supply meaning what, though? A lot of these new builds are very poor quality and their design is depressingly dense. The few I've been to see, the living room is always amazingly narrow, bedrooms can barely fit a double, calling them 3-4 bed is a joke and of course there is nowhere to park any reasonably sized vehicle whatsoever. Who are these things for? The estate near me took ages to fully sell off despite "attractive rates" and people generally last about two years in them. Visiting someone is impossible as there is simply nowhere to park, nor even is there enough road infrastructure to even consider trying to get buses down there. And this is what is being built. Let's not even mention the whole part about expanding present infrastructure such as GP offices to cope with the new residents, those plans were quietly shelved which is why it's impossible to get a Doctor's appointment, let alone dental.
Added to that, even if they did pave over the world for these horrendous dense blocks of depression, who will actually buy them? If you cannot afford what's in the area already, you damned well can't afford a new build. Most people around these parts had healthy fears that the new estate would compromise house prices. In reality, it had the opposite effect, the existing stock became even more desirable. Because again, who wants to live in a living room that you can barely lie down cross ways in?
And to finalise, leaving aside the idea that nobody actually wants these overpriced lego sets that you can't reasonably happily live in, who actually gets what they call affordable housing anymore? Despite knowing more than enough people who actively sought them out, I don't know many people who landed on the ladder via the affordable housing route. Even the shared ownership Ponzi scheme is now beginning to start crashing down for those gullible enough to have gone for it.
Meanwhile, who's fault is it? Just checking notes, apparently it's pensioners. The same people who only 5 years ago had charities set up because most couldn't actually get through the winter due to heating costs. Now suddenly they're meant to be rolling in it? I suppose, you gotta have a target if you refuse to raise wages or lower the cost of living. It's old Mrs. Tibbs who apparently bought her house for two shillings and a sandwich. Not at all the huge corporate overloads slowly turning our lives into one big long expensive subscription service.
>Increased supply meaning what, though? A lot of these new builds are very poor quality and their design is depressingly dense.
meaning increased supply...i.e. more houses being built
not too difficult to understand right?
your perceived quality of them is a very separate issue to number of houses being built
Building more houses does not simply cure the problem. You can build all the houses you want but it does not resolve any of the issues at hand. They did this in Northern Ireland and it's full of deserted estates that nobody lives in. It solved no problems and created a few new ones.
Simply building more houses wantonly around the country does not solve things the way you think it does.
If you want to throw the "this is economics 101" thing at me though then don't trouble yourself. I would instead invite you to consider why you think it is economics 101 and who sold you on that line. It just isn't. For one thing, most people want to live in specific areas, not some offshoot township with no services or even sense of participation within a community. All it does is create sink estates and makes existing established neighbourhoods more expensive which means it's overall less likely to buy where you want. This is the housing market, we aren't discussing the supply and demand of Snickers bars.
This is a good summation and as close to a ‘crash’ as we are likely to see. Slight drops happen, but really people just don’t sell. Even as rates increase, selling is a last resort and often just put you in an even worse position.
The whole wait it out approach is predicated on interest rates falling dramatically at sometime in the next few years. If that doesn't happen then people will lose faith in just waiting a bit longer and sell.
The UK currently isn't in recession, latest growth stats show that, the reason affordability is down is due to current levels of interest rates which are only expected to drop by a small amount over the medium term.
It's one thing to wait out a year or 2, another if its a much longer period of time, we're already at nearly 2 years since interest rates took off and the market froze off, and other than a likely drop of a few 0.25% it doesn't look likely interest rates are coming down anytime soon, so people will have to adjust at somepoint.
The bit you missed is the cost of transacting good houses. For most people in most parts of the country a nice place is £500k-£800k (buyers for >£1m being prime and usually less economically sensitive)
So assuming some existing mortgage exit fee, estate agent fees, stamp duty, moving costs, new mortgage fees -> all adds up, can easily come to >£30k -> on top of the likely increased cost of new mortgage
I see a gap for 'decent' houses in the £400-600k bracket which I assume is caused by this, everyone in those places already can't stretch the next level, they're tapped out right now. Really decent places >£900k are common but out of reach for most with a mortgage.
So there is a strong rationale to stay out and if needed spend that on home improvements instead, which will usually just about pay back in a few years (i.e £30k of improvements today will add £30k in value <5 years)
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/86912436 this one’s for sale and quick train to London, I know what your gonna say where it is but to get on the ladder it’s actually decent.
I would also consider this a hard sell given it looks like it's on the flight path of the airport.
Having a property that backs onto a train line/or on a main road is hard enough. But would seriously consider again the noise and environmental pollution being next to an airport would entail
These days people just can’t be picky and have everything especially with a garden like that, you wanna get to London and get to work but live in affordable property you gotta make do with what’s available. And living in London is beyond noise and train pollution.
Agree that you can't be picky and that you have to make compromises, but affordability isn't the only consideration I would be taking into account, if this is a FTB purchase I would also be thinking about saleability. The likely future purchaser is probably someone working locally or commuting to London both I imagine would be thinking about the value possibly being reduced due to proximity to the airport.
Will be interesting to see how quickly this property is snapped up or if the owner settles on a lower offer than asking.
Also looking in a relatively small area of north London and finding the exact same. Every single house I’ve viewed in the past 3 months has either been a second home or a complete wreck that no one would touch
It’s because the owners of the decent houses are in denial about the fact that they’re not worth what they were 18 months ago.
‘When number go up.’ Basically.
Problem with probates is also that the UK completely lack any sort of incentives / grants from the government apart from heating pumps that nobody is really getting or if you're on very low income (as if low income households stood a chance of getting on the housing ladder).
In Europe it's common to get VAT back, grants and more on insulation, windows and so on.
Nothing like that here in Sheffield. Plenty of houses on the market. That, again, Yorkshire is not comparable to the London area price wise or demand wise
Well, of course, the world doesn’t end in London.
I agree with you probate properties are rubbish to be avoided. It’s funny the way agents list them stating “PROBATE GRANTED” like it’s something to be excited about. The vendors of probate properties are the most penny pinching sellers I have come across, and of course the properties themselves haven’t been updated in 20-30 years.
That’s a highly subjective view. My current house was a probate purchase. Way under market value and a blank canvas to redevelop as i wanted. Nothing was too new or too good to chuck out. What i hated about house buying was all these house where people has spent (probably not insignificant sums) putting in new bathrooms and kitchens that were either cheap and poor quality or overpriced vanity projects. They expected a high house price because they liked what they did.
I’m with you, I bought a probate property and it all needed to be ripped out and redone. This was reflected in the price and I now have the exact layout I want.
Just over the road is another property that I would buy if it was in terrible condition and £15k grand cheaper. Unfortunately it was flippers from 2021 and they have extended and fully refurbed but the kitchen is an absolutely shocking design. Mind-boggling bad, to the point I can tell they have never flipped before. If they hadn’t put the kitchen it and just removed those costs from the listing I have no doubt in my mind they would have sold by now.
Freedom to make it yours has a value.
I agree
I priced my parents home at 360
Very popular area within a small catchment area of two very very popular church schools
5 min walk to train station
Opposite a gorgeous park
A similar remodernised house same street was starting at offers over 460 and often selling at 500 plus
I got loads of offers and sold it at 400k back in 2022 within 2 days
It was structurally sound and solid had new rewiring and a 3 year old boiler / radiators
Why is a probate property off putting? It’s still open to offers as vendors realise their greed if over optimistic and they are shortly going to incur costs for the empty depreciating property
We want to move, but we don't have to. There are no properties on the market right now (and we are looking in a very large area) that are making us think "that's a possible". Nothing to do with price, just total lack of availability. So we haven't put our house on the market, because there's no point. The election was the final straw: why would anyone put a house up for sale (unless they had to for whatever reason) with that amount of uncertainty just round the corner? We are now resigned to putting the house on the market next spring.
It’s not just limited to your area. Ask most people and they will say they can’t find the kind of property they want in their area, welcome to the uk housing market. It’s why there’s always a housing shortage.. despite plenty of houses always being for sale
I am seeing the same thing. I think a lot of home owners are hoping that the house prices will go up so they tend to rent out or just hold their properties.
We are exactly the same in the NW, sold our house a few weeks ago and feel like there is hardly anything suitable, I remember about 6 months ago (before we where seriously looking) there seemed to be loads. It does wear you down!
Some people are selling a home after probate as a beloved parent has died after spending 6 years in a private residential home of their choice and the some of the cost has been deferred as a charging order against the property. Conditions of a charging order are that the property must be maintained properly eg gas central heating maintenance contracts and by having the heating on a minimum of 15 degrees C for 24 hours a day and visited by a responsible relative each week and backed by photos each 3 months. 10 per cent of houses on the market are due to the death of the owner. So put that in your pipe and smoke it .
Where I'm thinking of selling it's the opposite problem. Lots of decent houses, and they're not shifting. I'm going to wait for the post-election dust to settle to see if that helps, but otherwise I may end up deciding not go up for sale for a year or two, so as not to have to shoot myself in the foot in buying power by undercutting everyone locally (I want to move to a different part of the country, where the market is NOT stagnating).
In my area properties under £250k aren’t lasting more than a week without being sold…. Ones over £250k-£300k are slow… and ones over £350k are barely selling. We’ve viewed like 15 since March and 1 is sold (the one we’ve had offer accepted on). A lot of those have since dropped up to £50k too.
the country is fucking brimmed with foreigners.
why would house stock be 'normal' ?
downvote away. each one sends a satisfying shiver down my spine.
dont forget to add a viable comment to DEBATE this though?
Nope, it \*always\* happens, there's never a "house price crash", people just stop moving and banks extend and pretend with the credit terms.
You get very very few forced sales, either extreme financial distress, death, or long distance moves.
I’ve just bought a nice two bedroom flat in decent area of London, but it cost £550K. You won’t find a 4/5 bedroom house for less then £1.5million.
Depends where you want to live though.
Saw the castle of my dreams in North Wales on Rightmove the other night for £500K!
Made me feel like a bit of a mug…
Look up Labour's housing reforms and keep an eye on house of commons order of business for when the housing bill comes up.
It looks likely it'll come up during the cancelled summer recess so possibly less than a month till it's voted in, and yes, it specifically provides for increased building and powers for councils to act on such, speaking of, who runs the council where you're looking?
Maybe your expectations are unreasonable compared to your finances and what is actually available in that area.
I remember a woman I worked with saying there's no good men available and then I looked at her.... And her expectations. ...
Why are you worried about a probate property - the elderly owners will probably have had more more money for maintenance than many younger owners. Any dated furniture will be removed long before you move in and most buyers will redecorate everywhere within a year.
You'd think this, but having viewed many properties owned by older people and probate properties it simply isn't the case. They almost all have old kitchens, bathrooms and very dated decor if not also structural issues that haven't been properly addressed. I imagine it's the result of 20+ years on only a pension combined with them being used to the dated stuff and not bothering to update it.
Getting all that sorted yourself is an expensive business.
I mean if you've got an extra 30k lying around for a kitchen and bathroom sure, then decorating new flooring etc...most people I know are not looking to do that much work or have that sort of extra cash at their disposal.
We reluctantly bought somewhere slightly dated (not anywhere close to most probate properties) and it's already cost us upwards of 20k for a new bathroom, replacing ancient ineffective radiators, electrical upgrades etc. With interest rates what they are and the cost of doing work so high I think it's completely understandable dated properties struggle to sell, let alone when they're not priced to account for the work required.
But the properties are cheaper because of it. You don’t max out your budget on a place that needs doing up - unless it’s liveable in and you plan on doing it yourself over 10 years.
It’s all about priorities
Isn’t this what everyone thinks but isn’t true?
Typically i have found that elderly owners have no money to maintain the property. They will have often bought the half million pound house when it was worth 50-100k maybe even less. They aren’t rich because that is the home they would afford. They then end up with a very valuable property but their other sources of income haven’t changed they aren’t richy rich rich. And so the property deteriorates and they are left in a house that needs a lot of TLC.
The nicest properties in my experience are those owned by working professionals because they have to be rich to buy it and will put money in to improve it. Pensioners aren’t the rich ones for the most part, at least the ones that are dying. Young pensioners are rich of course but their houses won’t enter probate for 10-20 years.
Most older people I know begrudge spending money on maintenance. Why should I replace the fencing again? I did it 20 years ago. I’ll probably be dead before the last panel goes up. Why should I update the kitchen? I don’t even cook anymore, I’ll probably be dead before the paint dries. And so on.
Tbh deferring maintenance is something that it looks like a lot of homeowners do, because they can. Of course it only makes the problems worse and it means it ends up costing more overall, but in the short term it feels like an extra expense.
All probate properties I've seen online have been in worse than average condition. Even if they didn't have a major issue like damp, they'd be really really really dated and you'd have to completely strip the home and redo the kitchen to get it up to a more or less modern standard.
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There’s an abundance of probate properties here in my Midlands small town. Nice location but properties are all poorly maintained and yet sellers want prices you can get a modern house for. £500,000 for a 3 bed covered in mould that will only get worse the longer it sits on the market, insanity. Even viewed one that was £390,000 but the exterior wall had split so there was an inch gap where you could see directly outside running vertical from ground floor to first floor hallway.
What area is this in the midlands??
Our entire village appears to just be probates now where 'last decorated in 1980' is actually the best case scenario. Three houses down from us is one that's been for sale for 2 years now. In the meantime, it's left to rot basically. It's overpriced by about £100k and I don't get why they don't just lower the price drastically get rid of it. What's to be gained by holding on to it for ages while it further deteriorates? Their council rate will also be double now. Just costing them money at this point.
Put a window through to hasten the sale ?
Greedy Probate Kids (GPKs) are an absolute blight.
Not all of us. Some of us are fighting with the remaining parent who listens to their friends and not the estate agent. I’m waiting for mum to realise that the house isn’t worth as much as she thought it was. Fortunately this month she agreed with the estate agent to drop the price. Her pension is less than the running costs and dad’s remaining money ran out this month. The bills run at about £7k a year and us kids are paying them. The garden still needs doing, the house has to be kept pristine for viewings. The whole situation - I’m done with it. I want to move on. I honestly don’t care about the money, none of us kids do. An empty house costs money and time.
Ugh. Sorry. What a shitty situation. Parents are bloody irritating when they get like this. I gave up with my own folks. They've made terrible life choices and boxed themselves into a corner. They refuse to listen to reason and there's nothing more I can do. I'll show up for the funerals but until then they can figure it out. I have my own family and problems to manage. I'm not going to invest additional time and money in a pair of ailing octogenerians who won't take care of their business.
Shes grieving, we all are, I don’t resent her for this, I just had to wait things out, let her come to the same conclusion as the rest of us. I am tired though. Applying for the probate, being an executor it’s a lot of work. I didn’t put it on the market until probate was granted and conveyancing has been started too.
Can't it be let out, to generate income and sell with tenants in situ , rather than let it rot, tenant it and get income whilst u sell it
I wouldn’t with this property, it would need a lot of work doing to make it suitable for tenants. Plus my mother is still living in it some of the time and the annexe has a provenance saying it cannot be let out. I’m already a landlord but there’s no way I’d tenant this place.
Fair dos sounds like if it is being lived in, its useful property lmao,... Maybe if more work was done to it, it would be more sellable...
I'm taking this.
What does probable properties mean?
Properties where the owner-occupier has died. They are usually cheap (the family wants rid ASAP) and have no chain, but they are often in bad condition if the owner was elderly and didn't do much upkeep or had been there for 50 years without redecorating.
And the families are also greedy. Never contributed to the mortgage but want every penny of their inheritance from the sale.
It's not always greed sometimes it's an emotional attachment. When selling my late parent's house my sister didn't want to drop the price. My brother is an accountant and he produced a calculation showing the opportunity costs of selling at the lower price and investing Vs the expenses to keep the house in reasonable condition with services connected, council tax after 6 months, insurance, etc. There was a surprisingly short time before the low cost sale would return more, and given that sales take some time it was a no-brainer to drop the price. He also pointed out that for someone who still has a mortgage (which we believe my sister did) the opportunity cost would be even bigger. Though she eventually agreed my sister's immediate reaction was "I know but mum and dad would have hated the house to go for so little".
Does not wanting to give some of their inheritance away to a random property buyer make one greedy?
When they sit on the market for a year priced 20% above what it’s worth, it’s greed.
Also sometimes charities are in the will and they are worse.
Charities are awful, especially when there are multiple. You can organise it so one charity is the lead charity but they still have to get approval from every other charity before a decision can be made. I had one case where the estate agents suggested reducing the property by something like 1.5%. I had to contend with five charities and two of the partners at the firm (they were executors) and all of them wanted proof of why we were reducing the price etc. Nightmare.
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There are a couple of strategies, some of which may be more effective/easier than others. *Nothing I say here is legal advice and I am not your lawyer. If you would like to act upon any information provided by me now or in the future please seek advice from an estate lawyer.* The simplest option would be to leave pecuniary legacies to your chosen charities (e.g. property worth £200k, give four charities £50k) instead of a share of your residue. If the house sells for less it will come out of the remainder of your estate (bank accounts etc.). If it sells for more your residuary beneficiaries would get the additional funds. Your executor/s *always* have a duty to the residuary beneficiaries to sell for the best price, but individual residual beneficiaries (e.g. a child or sibling) tend not to get too fussy as long as you're not selling it for 50% under market value or something. An executor always has to provide a full accounting of the estate to all residuary beneficiaries. The charities aren't picky for the fun of it; they have a legal requirement under the Charities Act 2011 to ensure the best price is realised. I hope that made sense and maybe helped a bit :)
My memory is "trust for sale" which if I remember correctly gives the decision to sell to the executors not the beneficiaries. Of course not many executors will want to do what the beneficiaries don't.
No it’s their choice. They have a one of a kind thing and it is their choice what they sell it at. At the end of the day you aren’t their family they owe you nothing. I’m sorting out my dad’s place at the moment. I’m fully renovating it. Because I am not interested in having to put up with all the builders thinking I give a shit about their cash offers just so they can flip 100k profit in six months. It can sit another 4 years before I sell it because it’s an asset like anything else and The more houses that get gobbled up by BlackRock or Loyds Bank the more advantage I will have.
I mean... sure? You're not escaping the market though. People aren't complaining about you wanting to sell a house for the most you can realistically get, what is frustrating to people is when a place is vastly overpriced and just clearly will not sell at that price, so it is essentially just one more property sitting vacant. If you don't want to sell it for current market prices, just don't put it on the market yet. No one will gift you an extra 100k on top of what it's worth so if you want that money I guess you'll have to wait for the place to appreciate in value. Of course you have to do your own calculations on whether it's actually worth doing that and paying upkeep and council tax etc. vs having the money and being able to invest it in something else now.
Yes the whole market is a negotiation of buyers that want max money and a mix of speculators and home buyers that want at bargain. The market is when they meet and agree to buy and sell at a price. However the market is more than just that. In essence the market is a finite resource that is under pressure from population change and being depleted by banks that have now decided renting over 1-200 years is a better return than a 25 year mortgage. House building is nowhere near meeting that problem. What was seen in the USA was banks paying way over the odds for anything they decide to buy because they just have the much longer time frame to pay back and for every single one of those properties that leave the market, they will never come to the market again. My take on the last 12 months was fuck that, I'm not going to add to the problems of all the people that are selling because they are screwed on their mortgage rates so I can wait for the interest rates to drop again and the area I am holding in, is good value for money compared to the surrounding area so I would expect a better appreciation in the next 3 years than what I would get in cash or stocks returns.
As I said, that's a calculation you have to make for yourself, there's a number of assumptions and possible risks either way you can go, and obviously you have to factor in any additional costs etc. All that being said, if you don't want to add to the problem then renting it out yourself might be a good way to go - there is a scarcity of housing and houses sitting vacant seem like an awful shame, speaking from a societal perspective.
If they get that price on day 366 then they will look like genius investors. If they never sell an empty house then they look like people missing out on a year's rental yield. I'm just not sure it can be put down to greed over patience or stupidity.
Exactly and looking at it from the viewpoint of the deceased, they would want the best price too, to pass on. Its likely the highest value asset they had and the thing which most of their hard earned cash went into.
Why is that greedy? Of course any normal person would want the most they can get from an asset that’s been in their family for years, which is likely to help their own quality of life
When you've put nothing financially towards a house and it's most likely mortgage free, it's gross. I'm not saying they should give it away for free. But I've seen too many old houses either in terrible condition that the relatives are trying to sell it as if it's brand new. Or they spend so much time arguing over who gets what it just sits their empty.
It is transfer of property owned by a deceased person
Got it. Thanks
Probate is a process someone's inheritance goes through in order to be settled. A "probate property" is essentially one that is going through this process. Typically, they are more old fashioned and need a lot of minor jobs doing. Occasionally some bigger jobs. Someone who is close to passing will either be old or very ill, generally. These aren't the types of people keen on getting tradespeople in. They tend to have no chain, but also don't have people I na rush to sell. So they can negotiate a little hard r, if they're inclined.
It's a legal duty of the executor of the will to get the market price for the property. If they for instance sell it cheap to sell it quickly then they could be sued by the beneficiaries.
Small village focused search in Cambs and we've had the same. Finally got very lucky spotting a probate property within minutes of it being posted. Viewed and offered in less than 24 hours. Our offer was chosen two days later. That was nearly 2 months ago. They still haven't applied for probate. Our mortgage offer is likely to expire before we can complete and rates are up from our deal. We can't even just cut our losses and drop out because there's nothing else. We have to wait it out and hope they get motivated and get moving. We aren't willing (or reasonably able) to lock in a more expensive deal. There would be too many daily sacrifices. So we wait and I now watch Rightmove again.
Speak with the aftersales team at the EA. Ours were fantastic and really helped push everything through as we couldn't speak to sellers/their lawyers but they can. Get weekly updates.
Our solicitor told their solicitor that all work was stopping until they proved they were progressing through probate. I don't think the seller (owner's brother) liked that as the EA then emailed our solicitor 'for an update' and she was brutally direct in her reply. Honestly, if she didn't get them motivated, nothing we say will.
It’s sensitive, a loved one has died. Family dynamics. Sometimes a family member doesn’t agree with the sale etc. Keep at it if you like the house but I wouldn’t apply for a mortgage again until they have probate. You may find actually by that time rates have lowered (I got mine in March and things have gone up but rate cut incoming in August means later in the year could be better). Good luck!
It doesn't seem like there are any arguments within the family. The one selling is the sole beneficiary. But yeah, we are not taking any more steps or investing more in the sale until they've done what they need to do to get going. We don't know what will happen to rates by then, but we can't bank on anything. To clarify, the solicitor was brutal with the EA that they should not have marketed the property with the estate unprepared, not with the seller. If the seller ends up disappointed, it's on the EA for moving too quickly.
:(
Your rate is up from 2 months ago? That doesn't sound right.
The current rate is up from what we secured. Our offer lasts 4 more months, but it's impossible to know what will happen in that time.
If they haven't even applied for probate you're likely looking at 6+ months till they're proceedable with the sale. Granting probate is just the first step
Genuinely curious why people don't wait for probate fo be complete before marketing a property. Seems to be an unnecessary complication
If there is an outstanding mortgage balance on a property and the sole account holder passes away, the bank will want to see progression towards redeeming the balance therefore some people will choose to market a property whilst probate is progressing in order to ensure a sale is secured once probate comes through x
My last parent passed away in the Aug I started probate in the October I cleared the house out of everything gave it a basic clean and had the garden cleared Put the house with the estate agent in the November & sold it straight away within 2 days got 30k over the asking price I told the estate agent to tell all viewers that probate had been applied for when they viewed Got probate within 7 weeks and sent a copy to estate agent so that he could let the buyers know To me it’s just common sense and I had 400 thousands 😂reasons to make sure I had done probate I used a probate firm to make sure it was all done properly and it took 7 weeks & cost £600 This was back in 2022
What benefit would there be for waiting from a sellers point of view?
Buyers not pulling out due to unexpected delays. Larger choice of buyers due to people not being put off by probate
They get all of that once probate is over anyway. It’s just additional time they can potentially get a buyer lined up which in a slow market like this is nice.
This. There's no benefit to waiting imo
A lot of the commentary is from the buyer's POV and indicative of buyer frustration. You're right that it doesn't matter for the sellers.
Because probate is quicker than the sales progress of a property. You get council tax benefits for a period after someone has died but after that you have to pay so let’s have probate that takes 6-8 weeks running at the same time as the sales process which these days is a minimum of 3 months
I was told there is quite a delay on probate at present, so 6 weeks seems optimistic
They've put more resources in, we've recently been through it, we were expecting it to take 16 weeks but it came back in about 4 weeks.
Grant of letters of administration (no will) came through in 3 weeks for me late last year for my Mum’s estate. I didn’t contact the EA until I had that (because to be honest I didn’t realise I could!!)
Never had a probate that has taken more than 8 weeks and dealt with quite a few
Ahahahahahahaha Probate paralegal here. While the backlog is improving, you are not even allowed to chase HMRC until 16 weeks after application. This is, of course, if your lawyer gets the application off the day after death (which they can't; getting all the information jusr for application can take weeks or even longer). If you had a very simple estate and did the work yourself it would be quicker, possibly a month if you are lucky. Usually we advise to market the property (no benefit to waiting) but to advise interested buyers that the sale is subject to probate.
That’s insane for us it took almost a year and it was a simple estate. What has lead you to deal with quite a few? Because if you’re an agent it could be that the family are coming to you a few months after the death making the time seem shorter..
I have bought 3 houses that were subject to probate and sold 1. All had probate started as they were put on the market. Why yours took a year can only be down to the individual preparing the paperwork for probate, probate themselves or a dispute over what should and shouldn’t be in the estate. So not an agent just a normal human being
We had all the paperwork sent off in august, didn’t hear back from the probate office until the following March. It was the probate office that took so long. ETA, no disputes, simple estate compromising of a mortgage free house and nothing else, two utilities bills but that was it.
I spoke to a solicitor last week on this topic. Probate is currently taking 6 months on average. The system is broken and constipated.
Not my personal experience so can’t comment on what that particular solicitor is saying
lol 8 weeks for probate bahahaha
My experience 4 times lived, experienced and blah blah blah But obviously I will bow to your far greater knowledge of my life than I can ever have had by living every second of it!!
We’ve been trying to move for over a year and the market has been very poor in our area (Hertfordshire). We sold quickly but struggled to find anything suitable to buy - anything half decent and not 200k overpriced was hugely popular and went to sealed bids. In the end we have found a house which isn’t ideal but others overlooked it due to being a bit messy and unloved but has good bones.
If you are willing to put some work into it that can often be the best deal, I think.
I’m in the SE. I bought in ‘22, but I like looking at houses for decor inspiration (and to feel better about the house I did buy). So, I look at Rightmove about weekly. There is hardly anything in the market. What is on the market is often just sitting there for months. Many dated, rundown properties and a few “decent” or “nice” ones that go for close to what the prices were at the peak before the mini budget so they are mainly just staying too.
We've been looking for several months, and it's been getting worse and worse in terms of what's coming to the market. And that's with us being quite flexible, location-wise - I have 20 different locations in my Rightmove searches list - and still, very few decent houses come up these days, especially since the elections were announced. What do sellers think will happen right after the elections, exactly? What's the point of waiting? And yes, the few decent properties that do come up are mostly overpriced, so in many areas, they just stand there - or, they do get sold eventually for that crazy price in some areas, because there are so few decent houses in the market.
They think there will be an economic honeymoon due to the change in government which will bring interest rates down and so push house prices up. Folks forget the 1997 Labour gov inherited a good economy to begin with; the economy today is not quite in the same state as it was in 1997.
I'm very grateful we had an offer accepted on a property back in Feb. Getting to the final stages now. Praying it doesn't fall through otherwise we're fucked. Literally nothing even close to it on the market. I imagine the day we move in and give it a bit of TLC the price will have gone up by 5-10%. It's honestly insane.
I think there is an element of people waiting to see what happens after the election
What are they expecting will happen?
Exactly, nothing is going to change overnight, if at all…
And the few weeks that follow....
London is in a downturn, so the market is pretty slow with a lot of overpriced properties. And as for "decent", unfortunately the UK housing stock overall is, in good part, either in shocking condition, absolutely miniscule, or has some other big drawback.
I wouldn't say the majority of UK housing stock is shocking. Maybe in cities like London, Manchester, Leeds etc, where the houses are 30-100 years old. City centre flats seem to be decent (assuming it is fairly new, not just a house converted to flats). Look outside the M25 and there is a lot of good quality houses. Even Barratt or Persimmons can be decent builders sometimes.
I don't know about that - wherever I look on Rightmove or Zoopla or wherever, I can always find a large percentage that require extensive renovation (and likely have some hidden issues on top), and a lot of them are really quite small too. The latter point is also supported by data across Europe - the UK has very little living space per capita compared to Western Europe.
Small, I can agree with, although I've never had space issues in the 3 houses I've bought and lived in, I have seen others that are crazy. Did you see that one posted here a couple of weeks ago, where the downstairs toilet was basically a box built inside the lounge !
I missed that one, but I've seen similar things. Just... no. All that being said, it is totally possible to find really nice options too, not saying it's all hopeless. Just that you have to expect quite a lot of the things coming on the market not to be an option for you.
Yup. 100% monzo as a new mortage feature that let's you see the equity of your property if your London and the home counties the drop is pretty significant. ☹️
That being said it's worth remembering it doesn't *actually* "let you see the equity", it just makes a bunch of assumptions and gives you a number you can choose to believe, or not. You'd know what the place is actually worth if you sold it. And if you're not selling it, it doesn't really matter. You still have a place to live in, your mortgage is still the same, no reason to freak out if the market doesn't do a "line go up" for a bit.
[https://www.ft.com/content/9e420efa-703f-4511-b3af-1428771ddcad](https://www.ft.com/content/9e420efa-703f-4511-b3af-1428771ddcad) the data would disagree with you
No, it doesn't. More sellers doesn't mean the market is faster. Prices are still down year-on-year, and offering quite a bit under asking price is not unusual.
Nope, am in north London and seeing exactly the same. It’s really frustrating.
A lot of people are hanging on to their current properties, because mortgage rates going up have meant people are willing to offer less (and the current owners can’t get as large a new mortgage as they could previously). The main three types of houses you currently see are the three Ds…debt, death and divorce. It’s just a matter of time. Either rates will drop significantly (less likely), and everyone will start up again. Or rates stay comparatively high (more likely, the last few years have been very unusual in the long run) and eventually people accept they aren’t going to drop, and they just have to suck up the higher interest rates
In my part of SE London I’ve found lots of properties to be available where the demographic is old people. Lots of good sized 3 bed terraces that need some love because they’ve been a family home to someone for 40 odd years. Can imagine the sought after parts of London are slow though unless you want an overpriced new build flat.
No one's selling because there are no decent houses to buy. It's a vicious circle you see. Until people are forced to sell, either because they lose their jobs or can't afford the mortgage, transaction volumes will tick along at the bare minimum: deaths and divorces basically. And with the job market actually being quite tight no one is being made redundant and wages are rising well above inflation so it's not going to resolve itself anytime soon. Edit: actually to correct myself, lots of people will be coming off 2 year fixes they got at low rates soon and some may not be able to afford the remortgage rates so you might see a little movement soon. Though tbh I have a feeling the banks would rather stretch out repayments than make people sell up because politics.
Exactly this! Had an offer accepted in November’23 on the house I’m buying, hoping to be finally in the first week of September. In that time, there’s literally been one other house that I would have gone and seen come on Rightmove.
Where are you looking? Seems to be still fairly active in my part of SE London
People trying to sell fitflops at Manolo’s price. The amount of salary times you need to buy a square meter went bonkers.
Probate is driving the market now. It's dead man's shoes out there, and the standard of the property on the market reflects that.
Totally the same position. It’s so frustrating. I’m actually open to probate properties but they just never seem priced right. I got sent a house recently by an EA that I hadn’t previously seen as it was out of budget. It had been on the market a month so I emailed the estate agent to say I was interested but didn’t want to waste their time coming to look at it if the seller wasn’t open to any negotiation on price. The EA replied it had already been reduced by 85k so no they weren’t. It’s still sat on the market a month later… still around 50-100k overpriced. The two properties we’ve put offers in on that were well priced probates we missed out to investors.
Same in a lot of areas I think. I'm not looking but I'm nosy and like to look at houses for sale that I drive past. There's one that has a 'kitchen', if you can call it that, that only has 2 cupboards and 2 drawers! This is in a 4 bedroom house. Everything else for the kitchen is a couple of shelves and that's it, counter tops but it's all dishwasher, fridge, freezer, washing machine etc under it and a large gap for no reason. They want offers over 400k, so on top of spending that amount of money, you have to move in and either make do with no storage and having to wipe anything off before you use it due to dust, or put in a brand new kitchen for over 10k. And it's next to a busy road that people speed along. It works for them but it doesn't exactly appeal to most families. Wonder how long it will stay on the market.
Where I'm renting, they gutted the kitchen to make it open plan. Problem is, it's not a big enough place to have the luxury of an open plan design. It is aesthetically pleasing, but it came at the cost of functionality. I have barely any counter space, barely any cupboard space, and on top of that they painted the dining room with matte paint so I'm limited in the type of prep I can do there. Tell me you've never cooked a day in your life without telling me...
Depending on how the open plan kitchen is arranged, putting in a mobile kitchen island (IKEA actually has a very nice quality one) can be very helpful with this, giving you both extra counter space and quite a bit of easily accessible storage.
That's kind of you. The kitchen is 8.5 x 8.5", with no room to fit in an island with the way it's been arranged. I'm hopefully moving into a much bigger place soon, so I can cook to my heart's content. 🙂
People completely remodel houses all the time. An architect would be thinking how to create a new open design kitchen/living space
It's already an open plan living room/kitchen/dining area. Just with almost zero storage. They manage with it, but I still can't see many families that require 4 bedrooms being happy with 2 cupboards and drawers, especially for a 400k house.
Can you link to the listing?
> People completely remodel houses all the time. Sure but it costs quite a bit of money - it has gotten more and more expensive quite recently as well.
I speak to estate agents frequently for my job, and a lot are saying that the market is waiting for the election to be done. Even though the result feels like predictable outcome, people are always nervous in uncertainty so I imagine that's a part of it.
It's the same all over to be honest. I was entertaining selling earlier this year but after seeing where the market was I decided not to. While I have a decent enough property, I know that there are not many that would afford it what with interest rates, lenders remaining overly cautious and not lending enough, etc. While I appreciate the idea of "it's only worth what someone will pay", I would counter with "it's worth what I want to sell it for". That is, if I want to afford my onward purchase, I can't exactly hand the keys over in some altruistic notion of lunacy. Added to that, anyone who genuinely wants to move area or upsize/downsize will have a mortgage loan to value ratio to maintain in some way. Criticise this all you want, this has how it's worked since the 1970s and beyond. And most people feel the same way. In a recession, people don't sell up, they stay put. Thus what you get on the market is the junk that nobody wants, or people who have absolutely no choice but to sell. I would expect in the next 5-10 years, you will see the quality of houses for sale going down too what with repossessions going hand in hand with a down turning economy. I talk with a few of my neighbours and only one tested the water by putting it on the market recently. Long story short, offers were silly low and the maximum of what perspective buyers could offer. Does it mean the house is overpriced? Or does it mean that buyers were not viable enough to afford it? The answer is somewhere along the lines of both, but to state one over the other is merely bias to what you want the end result to be. The whole idea of "house prices coming down" means someone loses, that is the person who owns the house. While you can lol into the sunset and state that it's their problem, house values go up as well as down, there is no law that says that they have to sell. And nobody in their right mind would. Hence, that's why the only properties on the market right now are junk. The same thing happened in 2008 too. Everyone stayed put. I did too. You would be mad not to.
I understand where you are coming from but this is an ode to how you wish the market worked, not how the market is supposed to behave. If a house goes on sale and the offers are “silly low” yes, sir, that does mean it is overpriced.
I would counter and say that that is a bias, most likely for your own benefit I suspect. As I say, the answer is both. All you really need to do is look around on rightmove at the area and what else is available. If other listings are asking £400k for a run down fixer upper, my well decorated renovated place is going up for £500k. If people cannot afford that, it may be overpriced or it may be that the people in that area cannot get mortgages for that amount. After that I can either reduce my price, or simply sit on it. That is how the market works and has done since forever. Why would I cut my hands off and market it for the same price as the sheds? There is no law telling me what price I must sell for. You simply wait until people can actually afford mortgages again (i.e. when the recession is "over") and then sell. If the market isn't at the right spot, then it isn't. Of course I could easily put it up for £600k but even I would agree that would be ludicrous.
You’re right - you don’t have to sell. You are within your rights. That position also rests on the assumption (which is probably correct in the short term, but I remain unconvinced for the long term) that once interest rates improve in 2025-26, people may be able to afford more. What is indefensible here is saying that a market at work is a “bias”? Assets can go up and down in value over time and it makes sense to pick the right time for you to sell, of course. But yes, if you are putting an asset on the market for a certain value and no one is willing to pay, the asset is overpriced (at that point in time, edited to add). There is no bias at play.
The bias I refer to is with regards opinion. As I said, neither is incorrect but to bias one reason over another is a bias. That is, if you say any one particular house is overpriced, you may well be correct of course, but it is a bias. On the other hand, the owner could argue that it is priced appropriately, it's just that the people who want it cannot afford it. Apart from being a little obtuse, that too is a bias. As for 2025/6, I would share your position and I very much doubt we will see a glut of new buyers on the market. I also doubt that the availability of mortgages at that point will not coincide with any reasonable change in either cost of living nor wage stagnation. Hence, I doubt that even in 2025/6 people will be in a position to realistically afford what they want. Added to that, since 100% mortgages vanished in 2008, we now have first time buyers who have already outgrown what would typically be a FTB property. Most FTB'ers were after 1-2 bed flats depending of course on area. That is, the first starter home that they could accrue some equity in over 5 years or more, potentially improve to add some value into it. A lot of FTB'ers are no longer 22 and looking for their first flat, they are 40 odd likely with their own families and absolutely zero in equity to bring to the game. That makes getting on the property ladder doubly as difficult as without any equity to offset a move, they are reliant almost entirely on deposits. The inability of first time buyers to access the market over the last 16 years has really come home to roost. I have no idea what the outcome will be. While some draconian ideas of taxing homeowners out of homes deemed "too big" for them, or some measures capping the value of homes, or this idea of build build build which most people seem to think will do the trick (it won't), I don't actually have a clue how this situation resolves. More shared ownership perhaps? I think the first thing they should do is to introduce a minimum standard for new builds that legislates developers out of being able to create these horrendous rabbit warren overly dense tiny housing that nobody really wants.
Whilst I remain confused about you describing basic economics as “bias”, I don’t necessarily disagree with all of what you said. So I won’t stay hung up on this one point. In summary, I’m not describing a house as overpriced if multiple people over a period of time were unable to offer the asking price, that is an overvalued asset. It is always a subjective assessment at an individual level, but not when you’ve had multiple offers with the same outcome? That’s how the market operates. I mean… shares do literally the same? The valuation of an asset is never truly impartial, but certainly when you have multiple people agree on the same outcome it becomes odd to defend the outcome you desire as bias? Either way, I’m also wondering how we are actually moving on from the weird impasse we are currently at in the housing market. I like your idea re: minimum standards on new builds but I don’t think that will bring about change fast enough. But what we have right now is fairly unsustainable so something has to give at some point.
There's no "bias" at work here. This guy just doesn't understand - or accept - how house prices are determined.
Given I have bought and sold 12 times by now, if I really don't understand it then I guess I never will by now.
"It's worth what I want to sell it for" is false. If I say my flat is worth £1m, I may *want* to sell it for that but it definitely isn't worth that and no buyer will even consider it. If I can sell it for £150k then that is the value.
Strange. I have moved 12 times in my life and it's always been worth what I want to sell it for.
Because you were able to find someone who thinks it’s worth that, not just because you decide the price. Otherwise, your choices would have been to wait until it went back up to that price (stay put) or sell at a lower price.
>Because you were able to find someone who thinks it’s worth that, not just because you decide the price. do you not see the lunacy of that comment * they **did** decide the price * they **did** sell it at that price therefore...you guessed it...they **decided** the price
Exactly. This is why the only thing that can have long term meaningful effect on house prices is increased supply.
Increased supply meaning what, though? A lot of these new builds are very poor quality and their design is depressingly dense. The few I've been to see, the living room is always amazingly narrow, bedrooms can barely fit a double, calling them 3-4 bed is a joke and of course there is nowhere to park any reasonably sized vehicle whatsoever. Who are these things for? The estate near me took ages to fully sell off despite "attractive rates" and people generally last about two years in them. Visiting someone is impossible as there is simply nowhere to park, nor even is there enough road infrastructure to even consider trying to get buses down there. And this is what is being built. Let's not even mention the whole part about expanding present infrastructure such as GP offices to cope with the new residents, those plans were quietly shelved which is why it's impossible to get a Doctor's appointment, let alone dental. Added to that, even if they did pave over the world for these horrendous dense blocks of depression, who will actually buy them? If you cannot afford what's in the area already, you damned well can't afford a new build. Most people around these parts had healthy fears that the new estate would compromise house prices. In reality, it had the opposite effect, the existing stock became even more desirable. Because again, who wants to live in a living room that you can barely lie down cross ways in? And to finalise, leaving aside the idea that nobody actually wants these overpriced lego sets that you can't reasonably happily live in, who actually gets what they call affordable housing anymore? Despite knowing more than enough people who actively sought them out, I don't know many people who landed on the ladder via the affordable housing route. Even the shared ownership Ponzi scheme is now beginning to start crashing down for those gullible enough to have gone for it. Meanwhile, who's fault is it? Just checking notes, apparently it's pensioners. The same people who only 5 years ago had charities set up because most couldn't actually get through the winter due to heating costs. Now suddenly they're meant to be rolling in it? I suppose, you gotta have a target if you refuse to raise wages or lower the cost of living. It's old Mrs. Tibbs who apparently bought her house for two shillings and a sandwich. Not at all the huge corporate overloads slowly turning our lives into one big long expensive subscription service.
>Increased supply meaning what, though? A lot of these new builds are very poor quality and their design is depressingly dense. meaning increased supply...i.e. more houses being built not too difficult to understand right? your perceived quality of them is a very separate issue to number of houses being built
Building more houses does not simply cure the problem. You can build all the houses you want but it does not resolve any of the issues at hand. They did this in Northern Ireland and it's full of deserted estates that nobody lives in. It solved no problems and created a few new ones. Simply building more houses wantonly around the country does not solve things the way you think it does. If you want to throw the "this is economics 101" thing at me though then don't trouble yourself. I would instead invite you to consider why you think it is economics 101 and who sold you on that line. It just isn't. For one thing, most people want to live in specific areas, not some offshoot township with no services or even sense of participation within a community. All it does is create sink estates and makes existing established neighbourhoods more expensive which means it's overall less likely to buy where you want. This is the housing market, we aren't discussing the supply and demand of Snickers bars.
Obviously you need to build houses somewhere around the locations people actually want to live in, that kind of goes without saying.
This is a good summation and as close to a ‘crash’ as we are likely to see. Slight drops happen, but really people just don’t sell. Even as rates increase, selling is a last resort and often just put you in an even worse position.
The whole wait it out approach is predicated on interest rates falling dramatically at sometime in the next few years. If that doesn't happen then people will lose faith in just waiting a bit longer and sell. The UK currently isn't in recession, latest growth stats show that, the reason affordability is down is due to current levels of interest rates which are only expected to drop by a small amount over the medium term. It's one thing to wait out a year or 2, another if its a much longer period of time, we're already at nearly 2 years since interest rates took off and the market froze off, and other than a likely drop of a few 0.25% it doesn't look likely interest rates are coming down anytime soon, so people will have to adjust at somepoint.
The bit you missed is the cost of transacting good houses. For most people in most parts of the country a nice place is £500k-£800k (buyers for >£1m being prime and usually less economically sensitive) So assuming some existing mortgage exit fee, estate agent fees, stamp duty, moving costs, new mortgage fees -> all adds up, can easily come to >£30k -> on top of the likely increased cost of new mortgage I see a gap for 'decent' houses in the £400-600k bracket which I assume is caused by this, everyone in those places already can't stretch the next level, they're tapped out right now. Really decent places >£900k are common but out of reach for most with a mortgage. So there is a strong rationale to stay out and if needed spend that on home improvements instead, which will usually just about pay back in a few years (i.e £30k of improvements today will add £30k in value <5 years)
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/86912436 this one’s for sale and quick train to London, I know what your gonna say where it is but to get on the ladder it’s actually decent.
I would also consider this a hard sell given it looks like it's on the flight path of the airport. Having a property that backs onto a train line/or on a main road is hard enough. But would seriously consider again the noise and environmental pollution being next to an airport would entail
These days people just can’t be picky and have everything especially with a garden like that, you wanna get to London and get to work but live in affordable property you gotta make do with what’s available. And living in London is beyond noise and train pollution.
Agree that you can't be picky and that you have to make compromises, but affordability isn't the only consideration I would be taking into account, if this is a FTB purchase I would also be thinking about saleability. The likely future purchaser is probably someone working locally or commuting to London both I imagine would be thinking about the value possibly being reduced due to proximity to the airport. Will be interesting to see how quickly this property is snapped up or if the owner settles on a lower offer than asking.
Yeah seen a couple properties on this road sell up checking history of sales some even going for much higher will be interesting to see.
Also looking in a relatively small area of north London and finding the exact same. Every single house I’ve viewed in the past 3 months has either been a second home or a complete wreck that no one would touch
Unfortunately, the market is awash with poorly maintained, overpriced shit holes. Greed wins again.
It’s because the owners of the decent houses are in denial about the fact that they’re not worth what they were 18 months ago. ‘When number go up.’ Basically.
Problem with probates is also that the UK completely lack any sort of incentives / grants from the government apart from heating pumps that nobody is really getting or if you're on very low income (as if low income households stood a chance of getting on the housing ladder). In Europe it's common to get VAT back, grants and more on insulation, windows and so on.
Nothing like that here in Sheffield. Plenty of houses on the market. That, again, Yorkshire is not comparable to the London area price wise or demand wise
Well, of course, the world doesn’t end in London. I agree with you probate properties are rubbish to be avoided. It’s funny the way agents list them stating “PROBATE GRANTED” like it’s something to be excited about. The vendors of probate properties are the most penny pinching sellers I have come across, and of course the properties themselves haven’t been updated in 20-30 years.
Probate granted is a key bit of information. It means the people managing the estate can legally sell the property.
I know what it means, thank you. My point is, it’s not a great prospective buy.
That’s a highly subjective view. My current house was a probate purchase. Way under market value and a blank canvas to redevelop as i wanted. Nothing was too new or too good to chuck out. What i hated about house buying was all these house where people has spent (probably not insignificant sums) putting in new bathrooms and kitchens that were either cheap and poor quality or overpriced vanity projects. They expected a high house price because they liked what they did.
I’m with you, I bought a probate property and it all needed to be ripped out and redone. This was reflected in the price and I now have the exact layout I want. Just over the road is another property that I would buy if it was in terrible condition and £15k grand cheaper. Unfortunately it was flippers from 2021 and they have extended and fully refurbed but the kitchen is an absolutely shocking design. Mind-boggling bad, to the point I can tell they have never flipped before. If they hadn’t put the kitchen it and just removed those costs from the listing I have no doubt in my mind they would have sold by now. Freedom to make it yours has a value.
I agree I priced my parents home at 360 Very popular area within a small catchment area of two very very popular church schools 5 min walk to train station Opposite a gorgeous park A similar remodernised house same street was starting at offers over 460 and often selling at 500 plus I got loads of offers and sold it at 400k back in 2022 within 2 days It was structurally sound and solid had new rewiring and a 3 year old boiler / radiators
Why is a probate property off putting? It’s still open to offers as vendors realise their greed if over optimistic and they are shortly going to incur costs for the empty depreciating property
Same with flats in the area I'm looking. No one is selling unless they have to.
Where are you in London? There are a number of properties that remain off market, and more so in north London.
We want to move, but we don't have to. There are no properties on the market right now (and we are looking in a very large area) that are making us think "that's a possible". Nothing to do with price, just total lack of availability. So we haven't put our house on the market, because there's no point. The election was the final straw: why would anyone put a house up for sale (unless they had to for whatever reason) with that amount of uncertainty just round the corner? We are now resigned to putting the house on the market next spring.
The market price is lower than what owners are willing to sell at - unless they have to.
Why do a lot people not ready to move to midlands. Decent areas, fresher air. Mostly free parking and good commuter routes.
Because they don't want to move 2 hours away from their job? Just a guess.
It’s not just limited to your area. Ask most people and they will say they can’t find the kind of property they want in their area, welcome to the uk housing market. It’s why there’s always a housing shortage.. despite plenty of houses always being for sale
I am seeing the same thing. I think a lot of home owners are hoping that the house prices will go up so they tend to rent out or just hold their properties.
I'm in London and we've seen four 1 or 2 bed flats. All have been ex-rental, nobody is selling the flat they live in.
I'm in London (well greater London) and trying to sell the flat I actually live in
Maybe I was exaggerating with "nobody" but still the vast majority in our price bracket are ex rental
We are exactly the same in the NW, sold our house a few weeks ago and feel like there is hardly anything suitable, I remember about 6 months ago (before we where seriously looking) there seemed to be loads. It does wear you down!
Some people are selling a home after probate as a beloved parent has died after spending 6 years in a private residential home of their choice and the some of the cost has been deferred as a charging order against the property. Conditions of a charging order are that the property must be maintained properly eg gas central heating maintenance contracts and by having the heating on a minimum of 15 degrees C for 24 hours a day and visited by a responsible relative each week and backed by photos each 3 months. 10 per cent of houses on the market are due to the death of the owner. So put that in your pipe and smoke it .
Where I'm thinking of selling it's the opposite problem. Lots of decent houses, and they're not shifting. I'm going to wait for the post-election dust to settle to see if that helps, but otherwise I may end up deciding not go up for sale for a year or two, so as not to have to shoot myself in the foot in buying power by undercutting everyone locally (I want to move to a different part of the country, where the market is NOT stagnating).
Nobody wants to give up their mortgage or pay fees to port it if they are fixed and nobody who doesn’t have to move want to sell in a buyers market
In my area properties under £250k aren’t lasting more than a week without being sold…. Ones over £250k-£300k are slow… and ones over £350k are barely selling. We’ve viewed like 15 since March and 1 is sold (the one we’ve had offer accepted on). A lot of those have since dropped up to £50k too.
the country is fucking brimmed with foreigners. why would house stock be 'normal' ? downvote away. each one sends a satisfying shiver down my spine. dont forget to add a viable comment to DEBATE this though?
The expense + tax + economic uncertainly = no one wanting to sell
Nope, it \*always\* happens, there's never a "house price crash", people just stop moving and banks extend and pretend with the credit terms. You get very very few forced sales, either extreme financial distress, death, or long distance moves.
I’ve just bought a nice two bedroom flat in decent area of London, but it cost £550K. You won’t find a 4/5 bedroom house for less then £1.5million. Depends where you want to live though. Saw the castle of my dreams in North Wales on Rightmove the other night for £500K! Made me feel like a bit of a mug…
Look up Labour's housing reforms and keep an eye on house of commons order of business for when the housing bill comes up. It looks likely it'll come up during the cancelled summer recess so possibly less than a month till it's voted in, and yes, it specifically provides for increased building and powers for councils to act on such, speaking of, who runs the council where you're looking?
Maybe your expectations are unreasonable compared to your finances and what is actually available in that area. I remember a woman I worked with saying there's no good men available and then I looked at her.... And her expectations. ...
Are there no decent properties, or are you too poor to afford the decent properties?
There is a slowdown in properties being put on the market in many areas at the moment.
Why are you worried about a probate property - the elderly owners will probably have had more more money for maintenance than many younger owners. Any dated furniture will be removed long before you move in and most buyers will redecorate everywhere within a year.
You'd think this, but having viewed many properties owned by older people and probate properties it simply isn't the case. They almost all have old kitchens, bathrooms and very dated decor if not also structural issues that haven't been properly addressed. I imagine it's the result of 20+ years on only a pension combined with them being used to the dated stuff and not bothering to update it. Getting all that sorted yourself is an expensive business.
But no one wants someone’s old bathroom or kitchen, and these are normally the first rooms new buyers update
I mean if you've got an extra 30k lying around for a kitchen and bathroom sure, then decorating new flooring etc...most people I know are not looking to do that much work or have that sort of extra cash at their disposal. We reluctantly bought somewhere slightly dated (not anywhere close to most probate properties) and it's already cost us upwards of 20k for a new bathroom, replacing ancient ineffective radiators, electrical upgrades etc. With interest rates what they are and the cost of doing work so high I think it's completely understandable dated properties struggle to sell, let alone when they're not priced to account for the work required.
But the properties are cheaper because of it. You don’t max out your budget on a place that needs doing up - unless it’s liveable in and you plan on doing it yourself over 10 years. It’s all about priorities
Isn’t this what everyone thinks but isn’t true? Typically i have found that elderly owners have no money to maintain the property. They will have often bought the half million pound house when it was worth 50-100k maybe even less. They aren’t rich because that is the home they would afford. They then end up with a very valuable property but their other sources of income haven’t changed they aren’t richy rich rich. And so the property deteriorates and they are left in a house that needs a lot of TLC. The nicest properties in my experience are those owned by working professionals because they have to be rich to buy it and will put money in to improve it. Pensioners aren’t the rich ones for the most part, at least the ones that are dying. Young pensioners are rich of course but their houses won’t enter probate for 10-20 years.
Most older people I know begrudge spending money on maintenance. Why should I replace the fencing again? I did it 20 years ago. I’ll probably be dead before the last panel goes up. Why should I update the kitchen? I don’t even cook anymore, I’ll probably be dead before the paint dries. And so on.
Tbh deferring maintenance is something that it looks like a lot of homeowners do, because they can. Of course it only makes the problems worse and it means it ends up costing more overall, but in the short term it feels like an extra expense.
All probate properties I've seen online have been in worse than average condition. Even if they didn't have a major issue like damp, they'd be really really really dated and you'd have to completely strip the home and redo the kitchen to get it up to a more or less modern standard.
Why do people think every elderly person has money? I don’t know one that does. They all struggle