Is anyone moving now?

Wait, what?! 11??

If you’re buying a house in a well established area that you know, what could searches throw up that might cause you to abandon the purchase?

My seller's purchase went wrong on searches somehow.

My conveyancer's reaction to that was "are you sure they're serious about this and not stringing you along? I've never heard of anything to go wrong on searches"... but they found another property to buy (went wrong at survey). Then a third..

Financial charges to the local authority (care home fees, arrears of council tax); infrastructure projects; listed building status; enforcement notices; building regs approvals (or lack of them if you cross-check against the property info form), unadopted road, TPO - all sorts, and mostly not immediately obvious or accessible without carrying out a local authority search. The local search is the key one really.

Water and drainage search will reveal where main sewers and water supply pipes are, and if any are within your curtilage or have been built over with an extension. Most important when it shows there is no connection.

Environmental search shows up things like historic quarries and contaminative uses in the vicinity, and flood risk. Even if you know an area you need to know what this contains because any mortgagee or buyer is going to get this info in future.

I suppose the only information they think matters is if they get an offer.

Anyway - we’ve just had an offer which is 5% below asking - only been on about 5 days but hopefully means we can push some vague competition among the other viewers going in/get these people up to asking.

Those who have transacted before or are in chains - how valuable is a house with no chain? I’ve been lucky that both transactions I’ve made so far have been that but we’re now moving up the market somewhat and it’s changing.

A lot of the houses we like are older people downsizing as houses are too big - they’re likely to buy somewhere that will be in a chain…but two of the places we’ve seen are chain free - how high should I be placing that?

The bigger issue with downsizing boomers isn’t usually the chain but their inability to find something to move to, often due to not realising that whilst their houses have gone up in value but still expect to pay 2000s prices.

Same for me. I always treat chain free as the top priority. The problems start when there is only one house you really want and it is involved in a chain!

I think it probably is.

There’s a lot of houses we are viewing that are chain free around the £2m mark in leafy zone 3 London, I figure many of these people have been posted abroad with work as why else would a family home be chain free. It’s either that crowd or old downsizes. Perhaps unsurprisingly there aren’t many people looking upsize - stamp duty kills this mid - upper end of the market I suspect. People are well paid but not completely fk you minted not to care as it would be at £5m plus.

Equally I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that people viewing our house are all first time buyers, as I said a few pages back, it’s still a large house and a £1.2m listing - I wasn’t expecting first time buyers to be the main crowd. But it means potentially it could be totally chain free on both sides which is hugely appealing now I’ve given it some more thought.

This is a common theme that I experienced looking at places recently. Older couples in sound but dated 4 beds with double garages, decent gardens etc in village locations that 'cannot find' - because they cannot / will not accept that the same money buys a nice 2 bed bungalow in the nearest town with amenities closer to hand.