Be Excellent To Each Other

How much does having a garage add to the value of a house?

Half as long as twice its length.

depends on location, availability of off road parking etc.

Going by the houses I've been looking at, I'd say for otherwise similar houses, a garage adds between £5-10k

However, thinks are pretty uncertain at the moment, and I personally am going to postpone buying for a t least 6 months, the way the prices are falling.

There's been a couple of houses on my road for sale of late. When I say of late, I mean for about 3 months. Just been looking at them on rightmove.co.uk seeing how much.

Given that I might have to move, selling and buying again is fast becoming an option, albeit one which I have reservations about, given the current climate. My thinking is it is probably worth commuting for an hour a day and wait and see what happens rather than moving straight away, especially if someone said, "commute an hour a day for 6 months and I'll give you 25k"

This. Totally. The only reason to buy a house right now is if you have a large deposit and really good credit and suddenly you can now afford the house of your dreams that six months ago was completely out of reach. And even then you're porbably better off waiting as it's pretty unlikely the market has bottomed.

As for garage pricing, I think the general rule of house pricing holds true: it is worth what someone will give you for it. Standalone garages in my area (ex-council houses, so no garages on the house, but there are runs of a dozen or so garages in a single building on each street) fetch about £8-10k. This is against a backdrop of selfsame three-bed 800 square feet council houses fetching £120-140k.

Also, you do know the land registry publish all house sale price data from 2000 on? There are tons of websites that make the data searchable, upmystreet.com springs to mind as one that doesn't need to much pissing about to get at the figures.

Honestly, don't buy at the moment. The market is a bit bizarre, and you'll find that estate agents aren't quite sure what to be pricing at (the variation between almost identical houses near us is amazing). And prices are officially falling lots according to RICS, so I really wouldn't be buying right now. Not to mention that getting a mortgage is getting more difficult (various places are closing their books at the moment) and more expensive (not just on fixed rates, some lenders are now charging for vanilla variable rate mortgages, the profiteering cunts).

If you do want to move, you're best off, if anything, selling at the "top" of the market and then renting until the market has bottomed out a bit (probably 12 months or so). Or honestly just staying put - which, even if you wanted to sell, you might find yourself doing, as houses really aren't shifting at the moment. Unsurprisingly.

You could definitely buy a garage for 25k. A really nice one too.

Oh, very much so.

It's just a pain in the arse atm, amongst most other things I've got going on.

I have a cunning plan to foil the current housing slowdown......

I have a garage*, you can buy it off me if you like. The doors are falling off and it's full of junk at the moment. Oh, and it's in the outskirts of SW London. But other than that it's great and would suit you down to the ground I'm sure.

*two, actually. But one we actually do have a car inside of.

I have a garage, it's just a house is for sale on my street which is just like mine, but without a garage, you see. And I was curious as to how much of a difference this might make.

Are the London prices meant to be dropping?
A flat a few floors below mine went on the market and was 'sold' (under offer or whatever) on the same day. No-one seems to know how much for, though.

The ones on the road I would like to live on, which I walk past on my way to the station in the morning, dropped from 995k asking price to 985k.

Another 75 of those drops and I might be in business!

It's not the drop in house prices that should worry you. Oh no....

It's the burning in hell for *owning* a house you should be concerned about.

Shit, I forgot.

put your postcode in here:
http://www.propertysnake.co.uk/

It'll list all the price reductions in your area.


Where I'm looking, reductions are between 5-10%

If entry requirements to Hell are that low, I might as well sin away (if I were to own a house).

Christ alive - between 10 and 25% near me. I should buy another house.

EDIT - I'm pretty sure I typed "C h r i s t", there, rather than "cunt". What an odd filter. I wonder what happens with "Mohammed"?

EDIT EDIT - disappointing.

3% here in Fleet for houses like our one.

1-2% near me.

Depends on which hell you require. The one that requires 6p a day, or the free one.

Although you should note that whichever hell you choose, CUS will be there poking you up the bum with a big fork.

re: Expensive House Prices.


Why doesn't everyone just say "No. I refuse to pay for your silly house. Give it to me cheaper".... et voila?

That still doesn't work.

Because the buy to let fucktard historically WILL pay that much.

8% drop in my area but that's ok because a similar house to mine is down to 124K. A full 16k more than I paid for mine only last December.

I have every reason to be smug at this very precise moment.

Between 9 and 17% in my area, it seems. Gnngh. I just know I'm gonna end up stuffed thanks to buying this place 2 years ago.

Shelter were quoted on the radio earlier saying that "House prices have increased by 200% in the last 10 years".

But they haven't though, have they. They may have increased to 200% of their original value, perhaps, but definitely not by 200%.

Down 4-8% around here. As much as 15% for some of the bigger properties.

Because someone will come along and pay more, up to a certain level.

1-2% here, for similar properties.

Increasing by 200% would mean they're 3 times the 1998 price.

Sounds about right actually in a lot of areas.

No way. The big house price rises out of the last ten years have been in the last 6-7 years. I bought my house 6 years ago, and it's risen by about 30% in that time. And that's in the southeast, where prices have risen fastest.

We bought ours 6 years ago too, in that time it's risen by 100%, when we bought it we thought we were paying a lot because a couple of years earlier the same houses were 30% less than what we paid. Around here at least the 200% figure seems fairly conservative.

I just went to get the data.

Average UK House Q1 1998 : £66,313

200% rise would be : £198,939

Real Average UK House Q1 2008 : £179,363 or 170% rise.

There's going to be a lot of areas over 200.

Source is the Nationwide btw.

This site will give you the prices that properties in your area actually sold for over the years:

http://www.nethouseprices.com/index.php?con=sold_prices

We bought our place in london three years ago and sold it one year ago. It went up FORTY FIVE PERCENT in those two years. I think we can extrapolate that back a couple of years and get to somewhere near 200%.

You just live in a shit area, mate.

If that's the case, I'll happily stand corrected. Blimey.

Our house was 205k when we bought it in Jul 2007, and that site lists it as 112,500 in Dec 2000. Thats 82% up in under 7 years ( and probably up a bit more in the 3 years before ). Plenty of "fashionable" areas would have gone up by more than that.

I bought my house for 100% more than the guy who sold it to me did in 2002, I checked

Our first flat we sold in Jul 2007 for 165% more than it was sold for in Feb 2000. I can easily believe that went up by more than 200% in 10 years.

I guess it depends on whether you can afford your mortgage and whether you're willing to stay put until the market picks up again (which it will, even if that takes a few years).

Houses in this area haven't risen by as much as others people are mentioning, but then this area was already overpriced when we bought a few years back. We bought for around £195k, and the house is now worth between £250k and £280k. Luckily, we have a side plot that's big enough to enable us to double the size of the property, so if the market crashes, we'll be able to stay put and extend, rather than sell at a loss/low profit and move 'up'.

Yeah, I've only owned for 18 months, and while the prices have increased 'a bit' in that time, it certainly hasn't been massive and with the latest crunch they're now stagnant and going a bit in the other direction.

I suppose its feisable prices will go down as much as they've gone up, if not more, and I could be technically out of pocket. Still, though, its better to have a mortgage and keep hurling cash at it while you're waiting for the market to bounce back.

Remember, prices aren't decreasing because houses aren't in demand - they are. There's a perennial shortage. It's just that right now the cash available to buy them is more scarce.

I bought a house in 2001-ish for £33.5k, then sold it in 2005-ish for £84k. During the time I owned it, I installed central heating, painted every room, put a new carpet in a bedroom and fitted internal doors.

I think it was the internal doors that did it.

Since then, prices on that street haven't really moved at all, although I've not checked in the last 6 months or so.

There is an upside to house prices dropping though, even if you bought recently. We bought in Jan 2006, putting in £15k deposit and (based on average house prices) it has probably risen another £15k in the mean time. If the market drops hard, suppose we lose all that equity and end up £10k into negative equity on top. That sucks, and it'll really hurt getting out of it... but in return it would slice £100k off the house I'd ideally like to be in, the sort of house that two years ago I could only dream of. I'd be able to go from my three-bed ex-council terrace to a four bed late Victorian detached house on a decent sized plot. Swings and roundabouts.

By the same extension, people think they are richer when house prices go up, but unless you own multiple properties, are willing to move to a rented property, can downsize your home, or are emigrating then you're not. Any percentage rise in your house will be matched by an equal percentage rise in the house you want to move to, and if that house is more expensive you just got poorer, not richer.

I'd gladly pay 40k extra for the added luxury of recently fitted internal doors. Did they have shiny knobs?

I think its also a question of perception. I'm sure when you bought your house in 2001 for £30odd k it seemed like a lot of money.

I think my parents told me they bought their first house for £8000 which at the time was INSANECASH. The vague point here being, the longer you hold onto it, the less expensive it'll ultimately seem as time goes on. If you have no desire to trade up, then you're quite literally laughing.

The biggest problem with a mortgage that a typical £700 payment a month is about £625 interest, and £75 off the actual balance of the house. The sooner you can fully pay off on *any* house, the sooner you can start saving giant lumpsums that will make you far richer in real terms than a larger house would. I reckon.

Edit: The bbc reads this forum. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7351275.stm

ALSO:

If you have money, use it to pay off your mortgage rather than invest it in a savings account - you will make more money via the reductions in your monthly mortgage repayment (which you can then invest, if you must). Mrs Chris and I did this with the last house when we were both working and it worked out wonderfully.

This is why I overpay on my mortgage by about £270 a month

I wish I could still do that. Only having one of us work and having children eats up your spare cash. I still haven't been able to start a pension.

You exaggerate, shorely? Or you have them the wrong way round?

Checking first to see if the lender penalises you for paying off chunks, obv.