Went to see a house in need of a lot of work ten days ago - in Marylebone, W1. The agent rang me this morning for feedback and to tell me three buyers fought over it to come in at over the asking price.


http://www.findaproperty.com/displayprop.a...p;agentid=08500

This has been on the market a fortnight. It needed £250k spending on it (new roof, new extension at back, complete gut - untouched in 50 years) and it is opposite a busy courier depot, 100 yards from the Marylebone road.

At over 1000 per square foot this is top whack for the area. - with another 200 psf to spend on it after you buy it, following which it might be worth 1150 psf.


Crash? What crash? Not here. Quality property in quality area - with mugs convinced that just because it needs doing up it will be a bargain.

Duff link?

Keep an eye on it, and let's see what happens...

This would seem to be the link: http://www.findaproperty.com/displayprop.a...p;agentid=08500

And to the OP - AWOOGA!

£1,450,000

I wouldn't pay that much for THAT!
Nice!

- Well you said it!

Let's just recap, One Million Four Hundred and Fifty Thousand pounds. With a further QUARTER MILLION required!!!

Offer £10 million, as a week on Tuesday it will be worth £20 million, bargain.

Telometer got my troll-dar buzzing by postcount 2.

Why didnt you join the "fight" for this one may l ask?

A chap in my office went to see that very house....it is very tired inside and when I showed him the link he was amazed about £250k refurb in his opinion (based on the refurb costs of their current house) it needed near on £400k. To get it right including with all the other expenses he guessed the total cost of acquiring that house would be around £2m.

He confirmed there was a lot of interest and that this was true of other properties he and his girlfriend had been looking at in central London, they want a freehold house . They are looking at spending up to £2m. I asked him if he was being besieged by agents and he said that with agents in Central London it was him that had to do the chasing in some cases to arrange a viewing. However they were also considering looking in Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells where agents were very keen indeed.

However he said last year he would have bridged to buy the right house, this time round he wants to offload his current property when purchasing, he will not bridge. He will be buying almost for cash.

I do find it surprising that a guy who is paid well for his expertise on structuring derivatives can believe that spending £2m on a property in the current market is wise. I suggested renting and he said he wanted to feel settled and was fairly ambivalent if the property went down £0.5million.

Therefore in Central London with foreign buyers and the city effect, prices appear to still be strong but outside Central London it is a very different story

>troll-dar

No. I'm serious. You're not necessarily going to agree with everything I post, though. Central London is not as hot as last year (i.e. prices aren't rising as quickly as they were), but they continue to rise.

>£400k

Your colleague was ripped off by his builders.

This property is now listed as sold. Somebody's solicitors must have been working quickly. (It belonged to a dead couple, so no chain at all.)

Same here. A developer wants the place I've looked at. It needs loads of work doing and I don't want to be putting in a huge offer for it.

Last week I also looked very closely at a property valued at £2m, I then put the magazine down and got on with some work

What were you doing there?

You have your own home and you tell us you're not involved in property. Something's not quite right...

What was I doing there? Being nosy. Work just round the corner from it; diverting few minutes at lunchtime and I couldn't believe the price they wanted - because I enjoy ringing an agent up four weeeks later and saying so what do you really want for it.

Instead she rang me ten days later to say "'I don't think this is the part of town where you should be looking if you think that's overpriced; I thought it was cheap."

...but you're not involved in property.

If window shopping counts as being involved in property then "yes I am". That is the extent of it. Have you never been window shopping for a new house?

First you say one thing and then another. More backtracking...

Eh? What have I said that is contradictory. (Other than the ironic observation that in your mind window shopping clearly counts as being involved in property.) You are completely paranoid. I'm not sure what you think my VI is!

You've been backtracking big-time on this thread.

She has enough time to make courtesy calls to time-wasters like you then? The market must be red hot!

That's very much a feature of the boutique agents around here. They only ever have a few properties. And a few buyers with a couple of million to spend. Say that slowly; a couple of million. Freehold properties round here are rare as hens' teeth; buyers for them are well worth encouraging.

Have you been reading the papers recently. Have you read the latest RICS report? Do you contest what's happening to the housing market?

NOT THIS BAD SINCE 1990...

This section is entitled anecdotal evidence. I have provided anecdotal evidence. Ring the agent and ask them how quickly it sold if you don't believe me.

Did you note that only - what was it - 60% of surveyors report more falls than rises. That means 40% are reporting more rises than falls...

OK. your (non-VI, completely unassociated with property) anecdotal evidence:


...and anecdotal evidence to the contrary...


Doesn't sound like they are that encouraging...

OK. What if I were to post: In Marylebone 'village' there are only three estate agents. They all have hundreds of properties. There are thousands of buyers with a couple of million to spend. There are many freehold properties around here.

All demonstrably not true, save for the numbers of buyers with a couple of million to spend. We know there are at least three, as there are the two who didn't get the house, and the friend of the poster up this thread. Are there thousands? That would suggest there is a spare few BILLION pounds out there all to be spent in one area of London.


Black is black. I suppose you fancy arguing that one too, and will argue I have a VI in proving the untruth?


If you think my evidence that agents are chasing buyers is untrue (as it obviously is, because I wrote it), that suggests that in fact agents have MORE buyers than they have properties for. Which suggests a hot market.

And yet on such canards rests the case for being bullish on property.

I believe that 60% more surveyors reported falls than rises. Assuming that all surveyors reported either falls or rises, that would mean 80% reported falls and 20% reported rises.

You are correct. Still that still means that 20% of surveyors are finding that prices are rising, not falling. Therefore of course some prices are still rising!

Well done with that analysis Telometer.

In the meantime over 50,000 mortgages were approved in January, which presumably proves that there's lots of people buying houses, right?

'cept last year, the figure for the same month was 77,500. December showed a similar fall.

What does this mean? It means that completions in March, April and May will be similarly blighted. If sales aren't happening prices drop, "supply and demand" remember?

What that means, Telometer, is that the overpriced flat* in Lambeth that you bought 2 years ago is not going to be worth as much as your mortgage. Which means that at best you'll be stuck there for the next 10 years until it recovers but it may even mean that you get repossessed and wreck your financial future and mean that my bloody taxes will have to subsidise you after your 65th birthday.

*and no, it's not an "apartment", it's a fcking flat and worse still it's in fcking South London.

Oh my God, No! It means that (only) 20% of surveyors are finding that prices are staying the same or rising, not falling. Spin.

I think you've confused me with somebody else, Paddlet.


Disillusioned: I don't care whatsoever what happens to house prices. You do. You are bitter and disillusioned. I am not! Sweet dreams.

Disillisioned, "Telometer" is trolling, see the great "maybe it's illegal to lie about the rent to a mortgage company, maybe it ain't" quote on a previous thread. The CML figures today must have him sweating like Paul Gadd in an orphanage.

The 2 notable critics above are far too harsh on Telometer for this posting, whatever cardinal sins he may have committed in other threads:

1) He has just given an anecdotal. Nothing at all to suggest that it is false.

2) He is hardly a ramping bull - he calls the purchasers "mugs".

3) In fact the better analysis of his post (rather than just rushing into the 'crash is inevitable' rant as Puddles does) is that it shows absolutely nothing other than that a few extremely rich people were interested in a house in a very expensive part of London. In particular:

i. It doesn't tell us anything about price trends in central London as there is no information to compare the price to like properties.
ii. It is clearly not a property representative of 99% of the housing market nationally.
iii. The fact that properties like this may still sell quickly (to people who may not mind if their property loses half a million as another poster pointed out) is not inconsistent with prices for most other properties falling or about to fall.


So, laugh at the purchasers of the property (I would, but I envy their money ) but shooting the messenger is rather sad as fu**.

Perhaps we are being too harsh. Then again, have you seen his other threads? Maybe it's just his style of writing which, deliberately or not, is particularly riling (especially when compared to Honest EAs).

Indeed. But the same is true of the majority of the posts on this site - they refer to one or two houses in a particular part of a particular town. So irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.



There are some psf details (reposted above), so yes, it does refer to trends. 1000 psf was the ceiling last autumn. This was marketed above and needs a shedload spending.

Clearly no property in Britain is representative of 99% of the housing market nationally. So what?



Thank you.

HonestEA, like most posters here, presumably has a VI in seeing prices crash, so that you can all make a killing from the next property boom. I don't care one way or the other. I have my own place; I cannot sell it at the moment - even if I wanted to. I have no BTLs.

I am reasonably neutral, definitely very bearish for luxury apparmentinos in northern mill towns, and believe that quality will outperform the rest of the market.

So you're the next casual observer....?

My guess is that the highlighted section shows your vested interest. Am I right in thinking that you consider your property to be one of quality?

Yeah, the HPC won't affect South London at all. You'll be fine, Telometer.

I do have a vested interest in seeing prices fall in order that I can not so much make a killing as earn a living. Realising that the market will only normalise in terms of sales volumes (on which my renumeration directly depends) once FTBs can afford FTB properties once again, the only thing I can do on a professional level is help to talk the market down to those levels (whatever they may be) as quickly as possible while at the same time discharging my duty of care to my clients to achieve the best possible price for their properties in the market conditions prevailing.

Indeed. ( As I'm sure you're aware 'killing' was not directed at you but rather at those posters here who are waiting for the market to fall so they can invest and benefit from the next boom.) Many here refer to VIs as though having a VI were evil. It isn't. Most posters here have the VI of wanting to talk the market down - so they can ride up the next wave.

In stating quality will outperform the rest of the market, I am certain that it will. Yuppy flats in Barnsley will be worthless. Victorian houses in the centre of Town will drop less. People like Disillusioned, of course, are desperate to prove that I have some VI. Go on!

If the market drops 50%, I shall take out a 75% mortgage and buy a dozen leveraged yuppy flats. Nobody will be happier than me.

If the market doubles, (and the current liquidity crisis may go away, in which case 6x mortgages will return and current prices will look cheap) I shall still have a roof over my head.

And the great thing is, I hope you believe that the credit crisis is just going to sort itself out quickly.

In the meantime, I've got a (rented) roof over my head that doesn't put any of my capital at risk and has a known, fixed monthly price until March 2009. I'm the stupid one, I suppose.

I have an each-way bet; you don't. Stupidity doesn't come into it. I consider myself to be exceptionally lucky.

The more you post, the less effort I need to make.

City of Westminster over the last quarter

All properties -11.1%

Detached +13.8%
Flat +0.5%
Semi-detached -49%
Terraced -17.5%

This is a terraced house, yes? Good job it's not semi-detached!

Depends where in central London. In WC1, property bee tells me there are 11 price reductions in the last week, and no rises.

The problem with figures like these especially in relatively low volume high value areas, is one house sale can distort the figures.

For arguments sake, let's say 2 quarters ago, some rich russian oil tycoon bought a 11 bedroom semi in city of westminster for 11 million, and 4 people bought 1 million pound semis. Then that quarter, the average price is (11+1+1+1+1)/4 = 3 million
Let's say the next quarter, 5 people bought 1.5 million pound houses, then the average of the next quarter is 1.5 million.
So that would be a drop of -50% on the house prices, but in fact the 'normal punter' for the area in fact paid 50% more(!)
Of course my example is a very simplified example, but is just to demonstrate how these stats can be distorted.
Also, I'm not trying to deny a crash, but we should take the numbers with care...

Also, when a crash happens in more desirable areas, if sellers cannot get the price they want, they will not sell - unless they have to. Buyers won't buy, so nothing changes hands unless it has to.
This provides an illiquidity problem - much like the credit crunch, where the senior tranches of asset back securities are still returning a decent cashflow stream, but the market value of those securities are almost worthless, and thus noone wants to sell their holdings for almost nothing to bargain hunters. Banks have to mark their trading books to the market value each day, and it is these losses which are seen. As a result they then make up for this paper loss by charging the guy on the street more for mortgages etc. When these instruments return back in favour, the banks still holding these will be rolling it in! - Now doesn't that sound a bit similar to BTL properties in some way???

Otherwise known as the "why a HPC will not benefit anybody" theorem.

Or as a very wealthy and wise acquaintance of mine said of his Cotswold pile "I bought it at the peak of the market [two peaks ago]; everybody always buys at the peak of the market as that's the only time you can buy."

Historically there's been some truth in that for top drawer properties but buying second-class property on borrowed money at the top of the market will ruin you.

And that's the problem. Do the posters here *really* want second class property? Studio flats in Lewisham. Back-to-back terraces in Burnley? Yuppy flats in Nottingham or Thamesmead?

These are the ones that have crashed/are crashing/will crash. It's a bit Irish to say, but they were never worth what people paid for them - the valuations were based entirely on hope which will never be realised.

Quality will outperform.

The price of quality property will still go down, maybe not by as much, but down nevertheless.