[Closed] Time to buy a bigger house...

Are you looking to make/save money? Or have a home to live in?

if you sell a home worth £200,000 at 20% less than market value - £160,000 - and buy a house worth £300,000 at 20% less than market value - £240,000 - then you'll have lost £40,000 off the value of your home when you sell, but will make £20,000 profit when the market picks up again. So to summarise, if you are trading up and can get your current place sold then it's a very good time to buy as there's so much on the market that you can get a bargain and make capital profit after owning the new one for a fwe years.

I just want to buy a house in a decent area with a 3 car drive and gardens. Not much to ask.

I had my 2 bed semi up last year, had about 3 people look at it! In theory you could save yourself a big chunk of cash by buying a bigger house, problem is trying to sell your current house.

if you sell a home worth £200,000 at 20% less than market value - £160,000 - and buy a house worth £300,000 at 20% less than market value - £240,000 - then you'll have lost £40,000 off the value of your home when you sell, but will make £20,000 profit when the market picks up again. So to summarise, if you are trading up and can get your current place sold then it's a very good time to buy as there's so much on the market that you can get a bargain and make capital profit after owning the new one for a fwe years.

Although in the last crash, thanks to inflation it was 12 years or so until your house was actually worth as much as it supposedly was in 1989/90, so your 'few years' could be a long time in practice. And what on earth do you mean by 'market value' - if houses previously worth 200,000 are selling for 160,000, then the market value of those houses is now 160,000.

In terms of the article linked - obviously if prices go down, it usually costs less to go up to a bigger house or buy a first house. Which is why house prices going down is great for almost everyone.

Joe

Listen. It's because of all of this we are one of the most heavily intdebted populations on earth - our personal debt has exceeded the GDP of the nation FFS.

So, stop arsing about with all this "trading" up and down and just live in your f***ing house.

And breathe.

You can buy my house if you like. £240k for a spacious new build 3 bed townhouse with small garden, garage, 3 parking spaces, handy for the motorway.

We've just done it. Now we have a lovely three bed house in a great area and three sheds rather rather than a 1 bed flat.

I think the key thing here is that the relative pricing seems to be changing as prices fall - a 2 or 3 bed house has fallen by more than a 1 bed place which surprises me. So, trading up is a relatively better now than it has been - not just as all prices have fallen by the same %age. Many people live in 1 bed places as that's all they could afford at the time but they may be able to trade up now - but maybe they'll wait to see if prices fall more. Wait too long and the opportunity is missed.

Damn... I knew I was going the wrong way! Sold our 5 bedroom detached house in Scotland, and will be buying probably a 3 bedroom... perhaps 4 bedroom... terraced house in a few months. Probably.

That said - we are sitting things out for 6 months, so lost 15k on the sale, and should hopefully more than make that back on the purchase due to the falling market.... so hopefully we will come out ontop. I think if we stayed where we were there was a strong liklihood that we would have found ourselves with no equity, or quite probably negative equity since the talk is of prices halving from peak to trough. So glad we got the house sold otherwise we would have been stuck where we were for quite few years... and I would have had to keep commuting 200 miles each way as I had been for the last few years until I got utterly sick of it!

Now... if prices fall enough we may be able to afford somewhere with a garage!!!! Not that there are many of those in these parts, unless you go for an estate house, and not really wanting to do that.

look at this and tell me how many years you think it will take for the house you buy now to get back to the price you pay today after it keeps on falling in value.

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.. but we are talking about trading up. The house you sell and the house you buy will both follow the trends.

I bought my 1st house Q3 '96, 2nd in Q4 '98 and current in Q1 '07; do what suits not what the market might be saying - you never really know....

I'm extending instead, though lord knows if I'll get the money back when and if I sell.

Buy an Ibis Mojo instead.