A Time of Magic

We’re trying to sell a rather unique property at the moment.

That’s clearly more difficult in the current market than it would have been a few years ago and therefore the buyers are that little bit more cautious about it. Essentially they want to know what the property is really worth when previously they’d have taken more of a chance.

Thus, we find ourselves becoming more aware of what it’s really worth as opposed to what we’d like it to be worth. As it happens there isn’t a whole lot of difference in the two figures and we’ve been keeping such a close eye on it that when we got another valuation done by an estate agent to help one of the buyers our own figure was identical to the one that we’d quoted that buyer earlier (no, we didn’t influence the agent: the buyer arranged the agents visit and we never even spoke to them).

The problem is that this particular buyer had started from the premise that he could borrow X, that he’d need to spend Y on various renovations and that therefore he could only pay us X-Y. Unfortunately, that figure is well under what we could accept as even a rock bottom minimum and it turns out it about a third of what the valuation turned up. To say that he’s not a happy bunny is putting it mildly as he’d put quite a bit of time, effort and money into getting all kinds of experts out to assess what it would cost to makeover the property into what he wants and now that’s all been wasted.

We all know that electronic things have been going down in price for a long time and that house prices have been going down for a year or two but what about everything else?

You might not think of books as something that would go down. After all, they need authors to write them and their salaries aren’t going down, plus they need seemingly perpetually increasing amounts of paper to print them on. Yet, whilst way back in 1981 the Encyclopaedia Britannica retailed for £600, you can buy the latest one (if you look around) for £450.

Houses might be dropping in price but surely house improvements would be more expensive? Well, we’re in the process of updating our kitchen and bathroom. Both are around the same price as the original cost some 30 years ago. And the new one will be much higher quality too.

It seems almost a case of looking around for things that aren’t decreasing in price.

One recent surprise was a whole host of “sold” signs in the local area that seemed to pop up over the course of just a few weeks.

That would be something of a surprise at any time to be honest. This isn’t an area known for really rapid house sales and these days you’d have expected that sales would go even slower. Well, to be fair, the sales did take quite a while as the signs have been up for months but to have so many “sold” signs going up in such a short time is quite surprising.

Of course, what remains to be seen is whether the signs will remain at “sold” or if they’ll go back to “for sale” which has happened fairly frequently over the past year. One wonders what terms the mortgage calculator will have turned up for the various purchasers. Somehow I suspect that there’ll be rather high deposits required and probably none too good interest rates.