Well…we put in an offer on the fixer-upper that we love.
We looked at the Land Registry prices for the last few years. They update it every month up to two months prior (so we had up through March ‘08 listed). After getting all the house info, we walked around the neighborhoods and checked out the houses that sold - did they have a garage? an extension? a loft converstion? Then we went back home and figured out how much the house was truly worth. As not a single house in the category (house with garage but no extensions) went for more than £400,000, we decided that this would be our TOP possibility. The place needs serious painting, carpeting/flooring, a new kitchen and some other bits and bobs of work….so it’s not even really worth THAT much.
So Roy called the lady who is not going through an agent. And they talked and ‘discussed’ for over an hour. But we didn’t get it. She is convinced that she ought to get more, because another house she is selling got an offer of £430,000…but the offer fell through - probably because the bank looked at it and the comparible ones and said, nope, we’re not giving you that mortgage as the house isn’t worth that amount of money.
Roy is convinced that in about another month or so, she’ll come back and ask us to buy it. Cause there really aren’t many mortgages out there to get (we’re in good shape) and the best offer she ever got for the house was £400,000 from developers. She just doesn’t get that this was a good offer. But she will…and we might no longer be interested.
So we’ve seen about ten properties so far. We have at least two more this weekend. It’s tiring and interesting at the same time. You envision yourself in the property - what would you do to it? What changes would you make?
What was good about the fixer-upper? It had a garage on the side - which means you can extend your house out that far on the side. And then again upstairs. It has some really good basic bones - larger rooms than many of the other houses we saw and a decent sized back garden (yard). The neighborhood is particularly quiet. And we’d be able to put our own mark on it fully. If the owner accepts the lower bid, then we might have to live with some imperfections for a while, but we’d still have enough money to do a bit of what we’d like - new kitchen, carpet, painting and wardrobes.
But if we don’t get that, what shall we do? Well…there’s one other house that we really like right now - it’s had a bunch of work done on it (walls taken down that we would have wanted), but we’d need to decorate. It’s not as large and doesn’t have the extension potential, though we could go up into the loft. But we could move in right away and just decorate as we wanted…cause overall it’s quite nice. And - it’s much less expensive and the owners HAVE to sell as they are moving overseas in July…so we could get a bargain.
What to do? What to do? It’s on our minds every night. Lots of food for thought.
