With the property market hitting media headlines over the last 5 years (or 50 years?) the amount of misinformation floating around is worse than every.

One of the areas affected by these myths is mortgages – if you’re at a party it’s not unusual to find someone holding forth on the mortgage market.

Here are some of the myths/rubbish we’ve heard and the truth behind them.

Myth No.1 – You can’t get a mortgage these days

Rubbish. Whilst we’re a long way from the dizzy heights of 2007 when you practically had mortgages free with a bag of apples, there is still a very very active mortgage market out there. It’s been helped even more by the governments introduction of the help to buy scheme.

Myth No. 2 – OK but if you get a mortgage the rates are rubbish

Really? A quick search on Google reveals a 1.99% fixed rate for 2 years with an APR of 4%. Admittedly this is reserved for those only needing to borrow 60% of the purchase price. When you go to higher loan to values the rates rise – you’ll be talking 4.49% to 6%. I’m guessing reading this you think that sounds expensive. Lets wind back to those ‘heady’ times of 2007. At that stage a 5-6% mortgage was considered a good deal. People would have bitten your hand off for a 4.49% mortgage.

Myth No. 3 – You can’t get a 90% mortgage

Also Rubbish. Do a Google search on “90% mortgages” and you’ll get a shedload of results. As I said above the rates are higher than the ones reserved for those with large deposits but the rates quote are still good compared to what’ve been available over the last 20 years. Help to buy means that 95% is now obtainable

Myth No. 4 – There’s a massive arrangement fee

There’s an element of truth in this – a few years ago ‘arrangement fees’ were definitely in the minority. Since the banking crash they are in the majority. However there are still deals to be had out there. One I’ve just found ticking all the boxes above:-

Our opinion: DISCOUNT – FOR JOINT APPLICATIONS BY GRADUATES ONLY. Competitive discount deal with no arrangement or valuation fees. What sets this deal apart is that it is not only a fee free low rate deal, but there are no early repayment charges. The minimum purchase price at 90% is £75,000.

Myth No. 5 – You can’t get a mortgage if you’re self-employed

Again there’s a grain of truth in this. One of the areas where the mortgage market tighten up forllowing the banking crisis is in letting people ‘self-certify’ what they earn – this used to be comonly available but has now all but disappeared. New rules have just come out which prevent this but they are somewhat irrelevant as the market has already stopped granting them.

There are a few articles about self-employed mortgages which give a bit more detail here

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/smallbusiness/article-2310556/How-mortgage-self-employed.html

But yet again it’s not black and white – there are self-employed mortgages out there – this site lists the top ten self-employed mortgage deals out there.

http://www.money.co.uk/mortgages/self-employed-mortgage.htm

Another site doing mortgages for self-employed people:-

http://www.mortgages-direct-uk.com/mortgages_for_self_employed.htm

So in one way the naysayers are quite right – you might not find what you want – but on the other hand you just might be surprised by what’s out there – and if you don’t even bother looking it becomes an absolute certainty that you won’t get anything.

And when you have found you can get a mortgage you’re going to need a conveyancer – get an instant conveyancing quote to see how much this is going to cost

By the time people come through to us they have already agreed to sell their home to someone – so they’ve already been through this process. However how you approach the sale of your home can mean a massive difference between selling straight away and leaving your property on the market for months (or possibly years!). Following these simple tips can also mean the difference between you getting the asking price and having to take a reduced offer (but there’s no guarantees they won’t try an offer anyway)

A lot of the points below come down to initial impressions – when people are viewing your home they need to be able to envisage themselves living there for them to serious consider making you an offer. Some people have great imagination and can see the potential in the most unlikely properties (have you ever seen ‘grand designs’) but many people don’t. When you’re selling you don’t want to be limiting your market to those ‘perceptive’ people – you want to give yourself as wide an audience as possible.

Mess and/or dirt

Your home needs to be clean and tidy when people look around. It might sound obvious but I have looked around houses before that look like either a bomb has just gone off or a horse appears to have been living there for the last month. If you can keep it clean and tidy then as well as making it harder to visualise how nice it could be, people may start wondering what else you have let slip – like important maintenance on the property. If (like me) you aren’t the sort that keeps their house spotless then you need to be ready to get the house ready for viewing very quickly. You’ve either got to live more tidily as long as it remains on the market or try and arrange all your viewings for one day, and make everything spotless for that day. If you’ve got the choice between letting someone look around now and it’s a mess, or putting them off until later when you can sort it out – generally I’d say put them off. 

Characterful (weird) decoration

People are looking at your property as somewhere they might like to live themselves – that’s why they are there. Their viewing will therefore involve them imagining themselves living there. Nothing makes this harder to do than weird/characterful decorating – maroon walls, murals, glitterball hanging from the ceiling – whatever. You may like it (and if you don’t why have you got it there!?) but the chances of a buyer liking it are remote. The generally perceived wisdom is that bland clean decoration allows people to project their own ideas onto it. So if you’re serious about selling your property, then it may be worthwhile redecorating first – in neutral colours that are gentle on the eye. You may find them boring – and so may the person who is viewing – but even so they represent a blank canvas onto which your buyer can paint their new home.

Bad smells

Again this should be obvious – if your house stinks of dogs/horses/sewage people can’t wait to get out, and it will colour their whole experience in viewing your property. Smells are very emotive and can lead us to make all sorts or irrational assumptions about the place if we don’t like the smell. There is a story that americans have some tablets they put into the oven when buyers are looking around – that fill the house with the aroma of baking bread. That may be going a little far – or maybe not. You can get those part baked rolls from the supermarket, and when you know someone’s coming put on a pot of coffee and stick the rolls into the oven. Looking back on my own house purchase I now realise that we chose our first house because they made us a cup of coffee. We’d just seen another house that was bigger, cheaper,  had central heating and didn’t have stone cladding (which we hate). We then bought this more expensive house with stone cladding and no central heating – all because they made us a cup of coffee and chatted to us. It sounds completely stupid now but it’s completely true – and we aren’t unusual in making decisions on little things like that

Rudeness

You may not like the people looking round your house – they may be just the sort of people that irritate you. This doesn’t need to be important – whilst you need to agree on things as the sale process is going through, after completion you are by definition not going to see them again because you’re moving house. So it doesn’t really matter whether you preferred another prospective buyer – it’s all about whether they are ready to go ahead and buy your property. So the point here is that it’s never going to be a good idea to be rude to prospective buyers. You’re looking at maximising your selling opportunity and you don’t what to remove interested parties because you’ve irritated or upset them.

Things not working

I can still remember showing a young couple round our first home when we were trying to sell it. At that stage the knob had fallen off the shower, and in order to switch it on and off you had to use a pair of mole grips on the thing sticking out of the shower unit. I was proud of the shower so I got the mole grips out and showed them how powerful the shower was. I can still remember the look of horror on the woman’s face as I turn the shower on with a grubby pair of pliers. She wasn’t visualising moving in – she was visualising running down the road screaming or having a good laugh about it all later. So if you’ve got stuff that doesn’t work get it fixed. If this isn’t possible or it’s going to cost too much, whilst you shouldn’t hide important stuff that would affect whether or not they buy you should also avoid making broken stuff the one thing they remember from the visit.

The price

The price is going to affect whether or not you sell – that’s fairly obvious. Over-priced and you’ll put everyone off; too cheap and it’ll go straight away. Take advice from your estate agent in relation to this – but also look at other properties like yours first. When you’re doing that lok at what they actually sold for – not necessarily the asking price. As an example of taking your agent’s advice, when I sold my last house I thought I’d get about 270-280K for it. That was what the other properties in the road had gone for. My agent advise me to advertise it at ‘offers over 260K’. This in turn brought a lot of people along to view the property and they arranged for them to come round at half hour intervals one Sunday. I was up to 3 in the morning doing final bits of decoration ( the house had never ever looked as good as it did on that day). I cleared the family out of the house for the day, Put on a pot of coffee, and spread out the Sunday paper on the Kitchen table. As one buyer was leaving, another was arriving. I told them I wanted to go to sealed bids by the following Friday and I eventually settled on an offer for 291K. My agents advice was really really helpful there. I should point out that was in a different market (this was in 2004) – and it was much easier to sell a property then. The advice still applies though – take guidance from your estate agent on what price to market your property at – it can mean the difference between selling in 2 months or 2 years.

I hope this has helped – if you follow some of the stuff above then hopefully you’ll get a buyer, and when you do you’ll need a conveyancer. Use our online conveyancing quoter to find out how much this is going to cost

Cheers

Mark

The difficulty is that the London market has been on fire for over a year now and that skews the figures. However as much of the national media is London-centric it is assumed that whatever is affecting London is affecting everywhere else.

Whilst there are a lot of different property markets they are all influenced by the media. So it might be depressed in a particular area of the North East, but if buyers keep reading stories of a housing market boom then they will start trying to look for properties and the market will start to pick up. Conversely, as has happened over the last 5 years, when the media paints a gloomy picture of the housing market it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy  – when buyers are told you can’t get a mortgage then they don’t bother applying for one – thereby reducing the number of transactions.

The other important point is that the media obsesses on property prices, but they should actually be focussing on the number of people moving. It’s the volume of transactions that will actually help the economy, as with every move comes a lot more work for carpet fitters, electricians, plumbs (and yes, solicitors too).

Our perception of the market (in terms of volumes) is that it’s definitely getting busier – we are recruiting staff at the moment and expect to be doing so for the next 6 months. Good staff are getting hard to find and expansion is difficult to manage. Even so I’d far rather be having these problems than watching the property market crash around your ears, as happened in 2008.

So whilst it grates to see this continual focus on London and on property prices, I’m pleased if it contributes to a generaly improvement in peoples’ confidence, as this in turn will increase the numebr of transactions going through which will help to pull us out of the recession and back towards stronger growth.

If you’re thinking of moving house now is a good time to get started – although you are running out of time to get in before Christmas. It’s perhaps a good idea to start your move now though – whilst things traditionally start to quieten down towards the end of the year. In the Spring I expect things to hot up considerably, so grab your bargains now while you can. If you are planning on moving then you’ll need a conveyancing quote 

Mark Slade

I get a number of emails every day from online ‘magazines’ connected to the property world. You would think that from such specialists we would get a clear idea of where the property market is heading.

However the messages that come through are anything but clear, pointing up one day and down the next. Here is a selection of some of the headlines on these emailshots over the last couple of weeks:-

• Huge jump in ‘riskless’ 60% LTV | Land Registry data shows flat market  – 27/10
• House purchase approvals up | Nationwide slash rates even further – 28-10
• Britons expect house prices to rise over the coming twelve months – 29 October
• London’s property millionaires surge by 8% in 12 months – 30 October
• UK sees 0.6% growth in house prices during October – 1 November
• Million pound homes sales weaken to two year low – 5th November
• FTB’s boost growth in valuations market 21%  – 6th November
• Transactions rise by 24% and prices rise by 0.1% – 11th November

There’s no trend here – good news, bad news, good news, bad news. The difficulty in making any meaningful sense of the information that washes out is made even worse by the fact that the national media then try and represent the whole country in one headline or soundbite.

That’s just not possible. There are sectors of the London market that are apparently going barmy at the moment but other areas of the country are fairly static. Even within London some areas are doing well and some aren’t.

Also your definition of ‘doing well’ varies enormously depending on what headline you are reading. Many newspapers can’t (or choose not to) differentiate between house prices and volumes of people moving. They are NOT the same thing but they are interconnected. Rising house prices in themselves really only affect first time buyers – it makes it hard for them to get on the ladder. However they do make for a great headline.

What actually has the biggest effect on the country’s economy though is volume of transactions. Every time someone moves they usually then do a lot of work on their new property – so there is a surge in work for electricians, plumbers, and sales of DIY products, carpets, curtains, and furniture.

Where the two are connected is that if everyone thinks the house prices are continuing to rise then they feel confident in the market and more people will want to move. If feel prices are going to plummet they stay away from the housing market. If they are not really moving much either way then we don’t really know what to think.

The headlines above seem to show just that – people don’t really know what to think- there are good stories out there but there are also bad stories as well. The general consensus amongst conveyancer I know up and down the country is that the market is going OK but it’s all fragile. Confidence is what needs to return to the market and while we’ve got the current goings-on in Europe this is in short supply.

So my feeling on the market is this – it’s getting better – more people are moving, but the real confidence is not there yet. House prices are not going to plummet. Some areas are going to have months of little growth but overall prices are going to rise – but slowly for the next few years.

When confidence does finally return to the market things could change quite rapidly.

If you are thinking of moving then get an instant conveyancing quote

Mark

It seems that the new year has started with a bang in terms of the property market. Mortgage approvals increased by 30% over the same time last year and perhaps even better news is that this time the numbers have finally ben swelled by people taking out a high loan to value –   Loans to borrowers who had deposits of 15% or less made up just 7% of approvals in January 2011, but this figure almost doubled to 13%  last month. The reason this is good news is that it starts to signal first tiem buyers returning to the market – which in turn will have a positive effect going forward.

The figures come from e.surv mortgage monitor.

If you are one of those first time buyers (and even if you aren’t!) and want an instant conveyancing quote then get in touch

Cheers

Mark

On a house costing £125,000 it will cost you nothing

On a house costing £125,001 it will cost you £1,250

On a house costing £250,000 it will cost you £2,500

On a house costing £250,001 it will cost you £7,500

On a house costing £500,001 it will cost you £20,000

On a house costing £1,000,001 it will cost you £50,000

We’re talking serious money here. In the last few years some schemes have cropped up where clever lawyers pick apart the wording in the stamp duty legislation to try and find a loophole that means that they don’t have to pay stamp duty, or at least pay a reduced amount. The schemes are often very complicated and sometimes involve money going to a third party or ending up back where it came from.

The difficulty here is that you’re trying to bend the rules and the people who are losing out in this are the people who make the rules. The chances are that these loopholes will be closed sooner or later. The danger is that they will do this retrospectively so the money you’ve saved has to be paid back. There are usually fairly expensive fees to pay as part of these schemes so obviously you’d have paid them out and not get them back. Whether there are any penalties involved I’ve no idea.

First rumblings that the revent aren’t happy came with this release last June http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/avoidance/spotlights10.htm with a stern message indicating that they would seek to recoup any lost revenue “through the courts where appropriate”

This has been followed by further amendments to the stamp duty act specifically to stop these sort of schemes (at http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/so/advice75a.htm)

Our advice would be the same advice I was given by my Dad years ago – “if it looks too good to be true then it probably is”. Regardless of whether or not  the schemes are technically correct, the Inland revenue will be looking to crack down on them and you could well end up paying more than you would have done if you just paid for the stamp duty in the first place.

If you need a conveyancing quote then please get in touch

Cheers

Mark

The research shows that the average cost of purchasing a UK property was £219,078 last month, an increase of 0.3 per cent on July, when average prices were £218,404.

The volume of transactions also rose by 1.5 per cent, which is in contrast to the late summer dip usually observed in the UK housing market, and which backs up our own experiences of the housing market.

David Newnes, director of LSL, said that the overall property market “bounced back” this summer, with consecutive months of price rises following falls between April and June.

“While some regions have seen prices fall, the rate of fall has shrunk. The housing market across the country is moving in the right direction. Prices in London rose most, thanks to all the cash buyers pushing up demand,” he added.

Maybe it’s not just me then

If you want a conveyancing quote then just click on the link

Cheers

Mark

I did a blog a while ago about how the number of Conveyancing transactions we are handling this year are a good deal up on the same time last year (36% up). In my last blog I mentioned that an Estate Agent friend had said firstly he’d had a similar experience with a 40% rise in properties sold, but that he could do a news story on this to the local press because they wouldn’t publish it.

I was chatting to another conveyancer yesterday – one of the largest in the country. They employ people to do their own stories to the media. He said they’ve discovered the same sort of thing – that good news just won’t get published. He said they way they’ve got round it though is to trawl through the statistics being published and find something that backs up a prediction that the end of the world is coming. They then do a story around that publicising their company and so on. This has worked really well for them – and they get some good publicity out of it.

I know that bad news sells newspapers. I just find it amazing that the upshot of that is that the actual news is ignored unless it complies with this doom-laden world view.

I had a look online to see if anyone out there had started a ‘good news’ online newspapers. The good news (see what i did there?) is that they have – the bad news is that they are pretty sad. Happynews.com and GoodnewsNetwork.org both seem a bit ‘firemen rescued a kitten from a tree’ or ‘boy had lost wallet returned’. Just because I don’t want to be painted with the misery brush doesn’t mean I want to go and live on Sesame street either.

Another site, positivenews.org.uk seems to look a bit more grown-up and have some more interesting stories. However when you want to hear the news you want to hear all the news – good and bad. If you go somewhere just to hear the mice stuff you feel you’re missing out on things that may be very important.

What I’d like to see is:-
1. Present ALL the news – good and bad. The stuff in positivenews is actually really interesting – but I don’t think I’d read about any of that in the ‘normal’ press
2. Present the negative stuff in a balanced way. Only last week someone was talking about the financial banking crisis saying we should all calm down, it’s not going to lead to another recession, it’s just part of the swings and roundabouts of the global financial markets and it will come round again after a while. The interviewer was palpably gutted – he wanted a good chunk of misery and was really disappointed that he wasn’t going to get it. This was on the BBC by the way, who are meant to be balanced.
3. Stop flogging a dead horse. Each news story has a life of it’s own. The relentless search for an ever more dismal angle leads to the sort of abuses we’ve heard of recently with the phone-hacking scandal

The thing is, the more you start to write this stuff down, the more you realise it’s not that easy. One person’ bias is another person’s balanced view. A lot of people do panic about stories – that’s how they cope. I do think it’s gone way too far though and I know from personal experience that continually looking on the black side will not help you.

To quote Winston Churchill:-
“I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else” – the press could do with taking a leaf out of his book

Cheers

Mark

We have been running an online case tracker for 13 years now – we were the first law firm in the country to introduce such a system. the idea is that you can check on the progress of your case 24/7 . Clients have always loved it. As time has gone on we have evolved the system so that the reports are updated every hour and more information is shown.

We always ask our clients what they think of it at the end of the transaction and some of the feedback has focussed on people thinking the system isn’t updated often enough (occasionally the update system would fall over and the reports might not get an update for a few hours). People also said they sometimes didn’t understand what the steps actually meant  – which isn’t helpful.

With the latest version of the online case tracker I’ve tried to address all these issues and more…

• Regular updates – we’ve made these better by doing away with them altogether! The information we’re showing now is real-time information – it’s like you’re sat next to us while we are working
• Explanations – we’ve added in a little information icon next to each of the steps – if you move your mouse over this icon a little panel pops up explaining what that step actually means. So for example we’ve got a step called “SDLT form submitted online”. If you mouseover the little icon the popup says “The SDLT form is the stamp duty land tax form. It’s quite a complicated form and we have to submit it shortly after completion – it’s paying tax to the government basically in the form of your Stamp Duty“
• Show who you are dealing with – at the top of the page we’ve got a picture of the person who is looking after your file. It’s not a library picture or a model – it’s a real person. We felt it’s always nice to put a face to a name
• Show what’s actually happened – we used to show you a series of steps that we work through on a transaction, and then separately show you a list of notes we’ve made, and so on. It could sometimes be difficult to get to grips with what’s happening. Instead of this we’ve thrown everything that’s happened on a case into a big pot and presented them all in date order. So if 15 file notes were done on one day and a step marked off the next day that’s the order they will be presented in. It give you a much better feel for your case. You can also change the default order if you want to
• Hide unnecessary detail – it’s easy to drown you in detail. We decided that steps that haven’t been marked off yet would be shown at the end but hidden – you can click a link to reveal them or hide them again. This is because it’s nice to be able to see this stuff if you want to but we don’t want it getting in the way of the real substance of what’s happening on your case
• Documents – this was a big change. You can now download and save, view, or print out all the documents coming into your case and going out from your case. The usefulness of this was highlighted to us the day after the system went live. We scanned a letter in at around 8:30. The letter was from the buyers solicitors asking some questionas aboutt he property. We would normally send a letter on to our client (the seller) asking him to let us have the answers to their questions. At around 9:30, unprompted, we got an email from our client saying he’d already seen the list of questions they had raised and let us have the answers.

If you’ve read this far I expect you’ll want to see what all the fuss is about so here is a sample of the new online case tracker

If you’ve got any comment on it then I’d be glad to hear them. The online case tracker is available to all our conveyancing clients free of charge

Cheers

Mark

There have been many false dawns over the last 3 years but this is the most positive  piece of real data  I have seen.

I picked up the phone to couple of other substantial conveyancing practices in other parts of the country and they have had similar experiences.

One of the characteristics of the marketplace over the last 3 years has been its inconsistency and we need to see whether this momentum is maintained.

The budget didn’t hold any “nasties”  so I don’t believe that that will stall the market as the previous budget did.

Once people know that their job is secure and how much their monthly mortgage will be then I think that consistency will return.

We will see –  for now  I  am just enjoying the moment.

Cheers,

Matt