Selling and Buying a House in Wokingham UK
[EDIT: Today, 21st January 2010, we agreed to sell our house for £450,000. Now we get to compare our on-line Estate Agent with the high street ones. We also need to find a house somewhere in Wokingham. Any ideas?]
We’ve been talking about selling our house and moving somewhere else for over a year. We’ve now finally got round to it and it’s on the market with an internet Estate Agent no less. You can see it here We’ve had two viewings already and I’m sure it will run and run. No matter what any Estate Agent says or how quickly your best friend’s or them round the corner sold their house, I’ve never sold in under 4 months. So that’s a long way off. Whilst we wait for that day, I thought I’d go through how we looked at moving.
Reasons To Move.
First thing to say is we like our house, we even like our neighbours. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac and our house backs on to an IAPS school called The White House School There is a bend in the road a few doors away where a short path leads to an open field where the children can play if they want to. Recently someone erected a Samba Goal. Just brilliant for the boys. Elliott, my eldest at 10 years old, has two friends in this end of the street, who he can call on to play. Finley knows a boy from school, who lives a little further down, but he’s a 7 year old that likes to hang around with his big brother. It’s also in the catchment area for the desirable Forest School. A good place to live if you ask me. So why do we want to move?
We would like a bigger garden for a start. Both our children play football, and other sports too, such as Tennis and Golf. Our current garden is getting a bit small for Elliott as he becomes faster and needs more space and Finley is also needing more room. With the boys running around and their friends coming round there isn’t a quiet spot in the garden where Lisa and I can relax. We could live with our garden, but we would love a bigger garden that can accommodate marauding children and relaxing parents at the same time.
I work as a consultant and when I’m not working at a client site, I’m working at home. There is a study we call The Office, and though it would be just fine for me or Lisa by ourselves, it isn’t ideal when both Lisa and I are trying to work. It would be nice to have either a much bigger room or two separate rooms. As it stands I tend to mix up work items and home items and end up misplacing them. I could do with a clean separation.
Elliott has been learning Guitar at school for the last couple of years, and now Finley is learning to play the Drums. Finley would also like to have a keyboard. Sometimes Elliott’s friends come round and they “jam” together. Of course it isn’t music yet, but one day soon it will be. If there was anyway we could create a Music Room for them , where they could play and record music that would be another big tick in the box. The thing is, whilst they are in the Music room playing, the rest of the house will be a little quieter, giving Lisa and I space to think.
Between April 2003 and May 2004 we lived at 1209 Elmgrove Lane, Keller,TX in a lovely big house. It had a decent size everything, but particularly a decent size Master Bathroom with a Walk-In Wardrobe. Even I thought that was wonderful. Now I’m not expecting the same for us here in dear old England, but wouldn’t it be nice if:
- We had plenty of storage space for clothes – about twice as much as we have today. No more putting stuff away for a season.
- The En-Suite had a Bath as well as the current Shower, Sink and WC.
- I didn’t have to squeeze into the Shower.
- We didn’t keep hitting our legs on the bed when squeezing between the furniture in the room. Stubbing your toe is very painful, and doesn’t help when all you want is to go to sleep.
Last but not least we have a Kitchen and Dining room together. We would love to have a big kitchen with one of those central units with plenty of storage. A place where we didn’t live in the constant danger of bumping into anyone else in the Kitchen. Part and parcel of a decent kitchen would be a separate laundry room.
Elliott will be going to senior school in September 2011, and if we are going to move we feel we should do it before he gets there. There hasn’t been the dramatic changes in prices recently, and we feel we’re at an age when leaving it later might mean we won’t ever move.
There are other less significant reasons, but it’s fair to say this is what is driving us.
Dreams and Reality
To get all the things we would really want just isn’t in our budget right now. We’ve decided to look for a home that has scope to expand. This isn’t the same as one that needs a lot of renovating. I don’t think our work schedules could cope with that. We’d like somewhere with a decent size garden, or even a decent playing field nearby (compromising works for me) where the children can play. We’d also like a bit of space around the house so we can build on either now or in the future. That is really the key to find somewhere we can move in almost straight away and then add to it over a period of a couple of years. I say move in almost straight away because we are happy to rent for a month or two to tidy up a dated house – nothing major just making it liveable.
Money, Money, Money
Money is always an issue, though not to the banks it seems. The current interest rate is about 3.4%, but for the sake of affordability I work on 8.5% which I think is the average for the last 20 years. The rate will go up and we don’t want to be left unable to pay. We have a Virgin One Account and we intend to keep it. My Consulting work means that sometimes a lot of money appears and rather than spend it we can put it in the One Account to offset the mortgage. It works like a tax-free saving. Our Mortgage is split between Interest Only and Repayment, and when we move we’ll take any additional money as Repayment.
Before we made our final decision I looked at the cost and built a little Spreadsheet. We intended to market our house for £465,000 and could potentially buy another home for between £400,000 and £550,000 depending how much of a project we really wanted when push came to shove. When I worked out the cost of selling and buying a home I arrived at an amount between £25.270 and £35,770, which is a lot of money indeed. I looked at reducing the amount, and took aim at the biggest cost.
Stamp Duty would be between £12,000 and £22,000 and is our biggest cost. The only way to reduce that is to buy a house for £500,000 or less, and I think we will look to do that. Stamp Duty would be £15,000 on a house that costs £499,999, but a house that cost just £2 more at £501,000 would be £20,040, an extra £5,000. Sticking under £500,000 would give us £5,000 to spend on upgrading.
What Have Estate Agents Ever Done For Me?
The next biggest cost was Estate Agent fees. Like all professions there are good and bad people, but I think the Estate Agent world has more than it’s fair share of bad people. I’ve bought three houses in the UK and in every case I have had problems with the Estate Agent and really can’t see what I would get for the £9,625 we’d have to pay them. Everyone I know who looks for houses will go to Rightmove or one of the other internet property search sites. This means that it doesn’t really matter that an Estate Agent can tell their other customers about your house, because they will see it for themselves on the internet. The big thing that Estate Agents are supposed to do is sell your house, but I’ve never bought a house because of anything the Estate Agent has said. In fact they often say the most stupid thing, and tend to be useful because they somehow got hold of the key to a property. So to cut a long story short, I checked out the prices of a couple of internet based Estate Agents. I was astonished that I could get almost the same service as a standard Estate Agent is supposed to provide but for under £800 instead of over £9,000.
My mind was made up and so we have made use of the services of Housenetwork We have a premium listing on Rightmove and within two days of it going live had our first two viewings scheduled. We have to show them round the house, but that is a good thing as far as I am concerned, because it means we have direct contact with our buyer and can sort things out without those pesky Estate Agents getting in the way. We can also add photographs at will, as the season changes we can update the photographs. In fact Lisa would like nicer photographs now. If you are in the market for a lovely 4 Bedroomed house in Wokingham for £465,000 then you can either take a look at the Housenetwork listing or try the listing on Rightmove