Bog Roll :: stuff/house

Over the weekend we moved house again. Our last landlord like the preceding one chose to try and sell the house from under us. The preceding landlord failed to sell and was forced to put the house back on the rental market - having missed the peak of the boom by about six months.

The new house is marginally larger than the two previous ones and significantly better built than the previous one. We hope that the current house will be only a temporary move our plans to but our own house are progressing and with luck we'll only be here for month or two.

We are gradually getting good at the house moving game. So far as we unpack, nothing seems to have been broken and everything appears to be in order. When we eventually move for the last time, I hope things will go as well.

posted 15:47 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

The house hunting goes well. After 8 years of searching we have finally found a house that we would like to buy. We have put in an offer that has been accepted and now we are in the infuriating state between acceptance and completion which could last weeks to months, or fall through, as one in three often do.

We have even found a house to rent to bridge the gap between our current property and our possible new one. Other than the inconvenience of a forced move we could do without, things are actually going rather well.

posted 18:31 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

The UK has the smallest average sized homes of the "developed" countries, about one third the size of a typical Australian house. The UK also has some of the most poorly built modern houses and a large body of inefficient and in need of replacement old houses.

For most of the last half decade house building has been a mixture of shoddy standard and poor design and worst of all far too few houses have been built, constantly missing targets for decades at a time. The Overall result is that houses are absurdly expensive and stupidly small. They are probably the wost value for money anywhere in the "developed" world.

An "average house" is now well above the acceptable level at which a mortgage is normally lent to someone on "average income". In 2003 the national average ratio was around 3.4 by the height of the boom it had reached 5.1. This is utterly insustainable in the long run and has been a contributing factor in the recent price correction.

Because a sensible house it so stupidly expensive in the UK, an absurd concept of a "buying ladder" has developed. You buy a house you can afford but don't want, pay some mortgage off on it, then after a few years you sell it and buy a bigger one and so on until you arrive at the house you do want. Given that house prices tended to rise faster than inflation in the 70s and 80s this would mean each trade up you could use the gain in property prices of the lower rung to fund the deposit on the higher rung. The fact that the rungs tend to get farther apart as house prices rise, was silently ignored by the bulk of the population.

When we moved to the village the "normal UK" thing to do would have been to buy a house and by now we'd be on our second or third house. Instead we chose to rent and even though we are being forced into our third house I still think we are ahead financially. If we had bought the first house we lived in for the price it was probably worth then of about £180k it would now be worth around £200-210k, a capital gain of £20-30k. We would have paid a monthly mortgage of at least £1k, or at least £250 per month more than our rent, which over the years means we have saved more than the house would have appreciated. Over the years we would have paid some of the mortgage off but we'd have also had much higher maintenance and service charges for owning the house and that excludes all the legal costs.

As it happens we have actually save considerably more than above figure, so other the inconvenience of having to probably move twice this year we should be able to buy the house we (nearly) really want this year with less of a problem than if we had done the "normal" thing.

PS. Trying to explain a house buying ladder to foreign relatives is very hard - it seems so illogically!

posted 16:23 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

What I have been expecting for some time has happened. The national media has been hyping houses to death and no doubt our "unwilling-landlord" has decided that now is the best time to evict us and sell their house.

It's their house and I have no problem with them trying to sell it, to be honest we don't like it, it's small, cold and poorly built, however moving is a royal pain in the arse and a "notice to quit" is such a lovely Christmas present. Given that winter is the absolute low point in the UK property market and we lose a fortnight to Christmas and New Year it's going to be really dreadful to find another hovel to rent in time...

This has happened before, and as last time our only consolation is that with property prices again falling and things expected to get noticeably worse next year, my landlord is probably going to be worse off than me by the end of next year.

posted 09:07 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

House prices are up again. Somehow people think rising house prices are good, yet when petrol or food goes up they are up in arms claiming that it's the end of the world...

There are three possibilities:

1. We are at the bottom of the recession and things are looking up.
2. We are not yet at the bottom and it's all hype from the vested interests in government and the media who desperately need things to be on the up to dig themselves out of their debt prisons.
3. It's just the predicted "dead cat" bounce and prices will continue to fall once reality bites.

With house sale volumes so low, mortgage expensive and rare and unemployment relentlessly rising I think we are just in the middle of a predictable fool's rally. Next year the new government (of whatever shade of blue) is going to be forced to cut expenditure, raise taxes and allow the Bank of England to raise interest rates (as they are currently way too low). That will force house prices down again and the house price correction will continue.

posted 09:52 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

It's fair to say that the news of the housing market is highly skewed and very biased in the mainstream. If food prices were spiralling out of control and many people in the UK couldn't afford to eat that would be a scandal. When house prices balloon out of all reality it's apparently okay.

Patrick Collinson imagines what house price stories might look like if Britain wasn't under the sway of estate agents: Fears grow of house prices spiral. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek but it does show how silly the British obsession on financial reality defying house price rises has become...

posted 17:39 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

There are a couple of interesting house price ratios. The first is the ration of gross salary to house price, which in the UK is normally no more than 3:1 (salary:house price) as normally lenders will only lend a maximum of three times the gross salary of an individual.

The second interesting ratio is the ratio of annual rent to price of the house. A normal ratio is 14:1 (rent:house price). This is important because rental rates are more liquid/current than sale prices and so more accurately reflect the real price of a house, not the vendor's "dream" valuation.

On both counts UK house prices are still way over the normal level you would expect. Where I live a two bedroom house is available to rent for £8400 pa, giving a £117 600 sale valuation, a typical salary where I live would be £30k pa, giving a valuation of £100k (30x3 + 10% deposit). However you calculate the normal value of a property, it's an awful lot less than the the current asking prices of £180-200k. Is it any wonder that nothing is selling? and prices continue to fall...?

posted 13:58 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

According to The Torygraph, property investors are losing wealth at a rate of £6 million per hour in the UK, as commercial and residential property prices normalise after the decade long bubble that has just burst. As rents fall through the flour at the same time and the massive over supply of property of all kinds sinks in, they can't even rent out their property for the long haul to tough out the current conditions.

Our previous landlady having tarted the house up but failing to sell it has now put in back on the rental market. When we were evicted there were fewer than half a dozen properties to rent in our village, now six months later there are more than two dozen. I think she may find the rental market just as tough as the sale market...

posted 23:35 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

When I came back from Holiday the latest BT bill was waiting for me on the door mat. They have charged me £105+VAT to establish my phone line - something they promised that they would not do. So not only did they incorrectly handle the phone move they also screwed up on the billing.

I HATE BT!

posted 13:00 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

This morning I received an email from a rightmove automated search suggesting that I may be interested in the house I use to live in. We were forced out by a greedy landlady who wanted to sell up and extract the capital that had appreciated in the house. At the time of the eviction she offered us the property for £225k (US$450k), which I thought was completely over the top. In the subsequent months she has paid two more months of mortgage repayments, the builder's bill to tart the place up and the loss of two months of rent. The house is now on the market for £10k (US$20k) less.

Ha! Ha!

posted 09:00 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

Today when I got home there was a letter from my bank. They have decided to automatically triple my overdraft limit, if I don't want all this cheap credit I can reply using the pre-paid envelope to let them know. It's very nice to know I can borrow a lot of money for very little it's even occasionally useful. However as I'm a tight northerner I avoid debt like a plague and doubt I'll do anything with this extra line of credit.

What is more annoying is that they sent it to the wrong address, we moved a month ago. It's not as if they don't know I have told them and they have already sent a statement to the new address... It must be brilliant if you are an ID thief to get a letter like mine...

Methinks the banks have only themselves to blame...

posted 21:20 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

When we moved house I completed a postal redirect form with the Post Office. I paid good money for them to redirect post from our old home to our new one. We happen to know the builder working on our old home at the moment and he keeps dropping off post that the Post Office haven't redirected. I'm not happy with the Post Office, I send a complaint but they would probably lose it...

posted 13:33 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

At long last we not only have a phone line but we now have an ADSL service too. Nildram even managed to get in enabled a day early! It only took less than an hour to update my two Debian Lenny boxes and one Debian Etch system, which just leaves one Etch box yet to update. We don't live as close to the exchange as previously, so we only get around a 6 MBit/s connection rather than the 8 Mbit/s we use to get but we are paying less for the contract so I don't care too much.

posted 16:48 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

Next weekend we will have ADSL at home again after the inconvenience of the house move. The Debian stable boxes won't need much of an upgrade but I suspect the Testing/SID systems will be bandwidth hungry for an hour or so.

In the enforced absence of Internet at home I've watched plenty of TV and seen the odd DVD. On balance I'd have to say that I miss the Internet more than I miss the TV, DVD being about in the middle.

posted 13:08 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^

We have rejoined the 20^th century at home. It only took BT a mere 12 days to move our telephone number from one house to another on the same exchange. In all honesty the chap that came to the house to put the land line in was very polite and helpful.

It will now take my ADSL provider a further 7-10 days to reestablish a useful Internet connection, giving me about three weeks without a network connection at home.

posted 13:34 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^