'Ouses, Greenbelt and stuff

If you own a share of the freehold, you are still a leaseholder, but you also own shares in a company which owns the freehold. Leaving aside the difficulties this can create when residents don't have the skills necessary to run a company, you would then have some form of influence over the selection of the managing agent. However, this right could also be obtained through other routes eg. right to manage or even just have a leaseholders association.

Also, when the residents are also the freeholders, it has the potential to be messy as it will be neighbours disputing neighbours.

I’ll stick this in here rather than starting a new thread. I’ve been casually looking at houses for about 18 months with vague thoughts of moving with a view to having more outdoor space and / or being more in the countryside. In that time I’ve only seen a handful of houses that interested me and the wife has maybe liked 2 or 3. I’d actually stopped looking as she didn’t really seem keen on moving other than to West Wales which she knows isn’t really practical for several reasons.

However, this evening she has seen a place she likes. It’s about 5 miles from where we live now and not much further for her to go to work with most of the other stuff we do being as close or closer. The house itself is effectively semi-rural with a 60m long garden, a 100 acre community woodland on the doorstep and direct access up onto mountains yet is only a 400m walk from the edge of a decent size town (50,000 population) with the town centre about 1.5 miles away. The house itself is a renovated cottage (it’s in the middle of a small terrace which is the only thing that isn’t perfect).

However, having not moved in 25 years I’m not sure what the process is like if we did want to move. I don’t really want to put our house on the market as we only want to move for something we really like (and this is the first time in 18 months that has happened) but I know some estate agents won’t let you even view a place unless you have your home up for sale and a mortgage approval in principle. A friend was recently looking to view a place having sold her house and only got a viewing due to knowing the agent as they already had 20 people booked in. Does anyone have recent experience/ thoughts about the best way to proceed if we decide to go for it? The last thing I want is the hassle and cost of moving somewhere we think is OK at best because we’ve sold our place and can’t get what we want.

There will always be "no riff raff" estate agents - they are usually blonde, about 28 and like driving around in the firm's viewings Mercedes SUV. There are also a lot of "no riff raff" sellers. My suspicion is that people are advised to try to give the impression of lots of interest when something is first listed.

Getting approval in principle for a mortgage is quick and easy. If you want to do a thought exercise and avoid putting half your belongings in storage to improve the feng shui, just make some shit up, like "yes, we have approval in principle" and "we are getting the photos done next week".

And be patient. If you really are looking at a place with a genuine frenzy of interest, there will not be any value in it. What we did learn was that a lot of the frenzy can die down, and sales fall through. We saw several very nice houses come back two or three times.

That's not true, sorry, or chains wouldn't exist. It really depends on the market. If it is hot, yes, but it really isn't right now. We were looking during the summer last year in Devon and Cornwall. The market was still warm. For the most part, if we said had our house on the market, (i.e. if you can say you have it on the market without blushing, OP), we got a viewing.

There were a couple where that wasn't the case, but one was still for sale when we had concluded 4 months later, and another went for over £150k less than initial asking. Like I said, patience.

Well yes, there are people who do this as a hobby.

For the OP, don't you think the schedule, snooping on Google earth and street view (older images can be useful as well) and a drive-by would tell you enough to know if it can be ruled out?

I know the place quite well as I regularly go past it to walk the dogs or do a trail run in the adjacent woods and mountains. It's a fantastic spot and the images of the interior look very nice. It's the hassle of getting ours listed that is more of an issue for me especially if it subsequently sells as we probably won't see anything else we genuinely like for quite a while. The one downside (other than in being mid-terrace) is that it has solid fuel central heating.

Being ready to proceed definitely helps and it's probably how (with a bit of luck) we managed to bag our current house.

Back in 2021 when the market was pretty hot we had our seller pull out less than 2 weeks from exchanging. Luckily our buyers had nobody below them in a chain and were happy to stay in their place until we found somewhere new. Went back out and found the current place, which seemed to have a fair bit of interest and had just come back on the market after their buyer pulled out (but they were committed to buying their new place). We put in an offer a little below the asking price but not too far off, expecting to be drawn into a bidding war. Made clear to the agent that we were as ready to proceed as we could be without being outright cash buyers. Next day our offer was accepted because they needed to sell sharpish (and we did the whole thing from viewing to completion in exactly 8 weeks).

This is the place (the white one next to the bare stone one)

Yeah, that's the real appeal of the place especially when the actual garden is such a good size too and yet it is a short walk to a bus route and 1.5 miles to a decent sized town centre and railway station. I'll see if the wife is still enthusiastic in a couple of days and will then think whether it is worth all the stress and hassle (something I said I was never going to do again). Getting a mortgage shouldn't be any issue as it is only about £20-30k more than our current place is likely to be worth.

Possibly preferred as no chain.

I’ve got friends who refused a sale because the potential buyer made reference to some cobwebs they had missed when cleaning for the viewing.😂

That’s where a survey comes in surely? “My surveyor says it needs £50k of work so can we discuss the price again please?”

Most vendors will say it is already factored into the asking price.