TeamEmbo

Go on the Moving Back to the UK forum and see who's looking to move back to your local area. Maybe you could do a deal with them on buying or rent to buy. Worth a try?

jill stanton

we have decided to rent out our house for up to 3years on a fixed rate basis with our Mortgage dealer. We are giving my mum power of atourney to enable the sale of the house, should things not work out in NZ and hopefully the market will be a little better by then.

Jill

Suzbits

I feel sorry for everyone who is trying to sell their house. We have decided to rent our house out. It has been on market to rent for only a week but had one viewing, loved house but they felt road was too busy We live in a village, not on a motorway, but hey!

Our estate agent told us that since christmas our house has probably lost £50k in value, and to sell quickly we would need to probably drop another £10-20k, which we can't afford to do. We are hoping that if we can rent it out then the equity in the rental payment should pay for 2 weeks rent a month in New Zealand.

We have never rented before but if this means we can get over in time for my OH to start the job offer he has on time then I will do almost anything. Then we will wait for things to pick up here and then sell our house - that's the plan anyway.

eddie_nz

well you may have to reconsider your plans

Nothing is moving in the UK you can see how hard it is to get a mortgage.

Also if your finances are that tight, you should never move in a tight budget in the first place.

teebrown

We had ours on the markets for 4 months in Scotland, and not one viewing, it was and still is rented, so we have now taken it off the market and it will stay rented and hopefully in a couple of years we will try again.

I mean look at it this way, people have to live somewhere and if they can't get a mortgage they will have to rent, so it should be a renters market? shouldn't it??

Charlie Paynter

The problem in the UK housing market at the moment is two-fold. Obviously there is the problem of the lack of mortgage products on the market and tightening of the lending criteria in the wake of the credit crunch. With that in mind, there is also an oversupply of apartments in city centres, which if you look at these apartments, many have not been sold, but others, which have been purchased by investors to rent out, cannot get tenants, even having dropped the rent substantially, hence it may not be a renters market either (excluding London, which seems to have its own micro-economy).

I think however, that where you have a house, it should be much better, as there is still generally a shortage of houses for rent - as Teebrown has demonstrated. Why not rent out long term and use it as a pension fund?

By the way, The Daily Wail is reporting today that houses will lose a third of their value!

P2L

Surely a lot of people who have remortgaged or taken out secured loans are in a negative equity situation??

Some mortgage lenders here in NZ, have taken it upon themselves to cut interest rates on mortgages, ( despite the Reserve Bank refusing to) lots of people are coming off fixed rate mortgages here and are experiencing massive increases in payments.

Certainly from our point of view, renting is cheaper than buying at the moment.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/12...ectid=10522789

Charlie Paynter

Are you still up? Must be very late in NZ now?

There are some people who is now in negative equity, especially those who bought in mud 2006 (the peak), with a 100% mortgage (or even more!), and now find that the property is worth less in todays market (although the average drop is still in single digits, there are some horror storys about apartments losing half of the values).

Also, the opposite in the UK is happening to that in NZ, where the Bank of England is dropping interest rates, but mortgages are going up. Even to take out a decent mortgage product, fees are crippling like £1,000 plus.

Carry on renting I say!

Margaret Parkinson

My daughters house had been on the market for 2 years when they decided to go to NZ. They took out the equity and changed to an interest only mortgage. They then rented it out on a short term contract (2 months) and the rent they charged reflected this. The tenants were agreeable to this arrangement. They kept it on the market giving us Power of Attorney and it was another year before it sold. It had been with the same Estate Agents for nearly all that time so I suggested they change to generate new interest. Within 2 weeks they had 6 viewings and it was sold.

All the best.

June

traciridgwell

Thanks Margaret - that's given us another option to think about!! - Will look into this................thanks again!

uk+kiwi

How many people lack the grey matter required to realise who is paying for these so called incentives? Buyers and sellers should be thinking in terms of net price.

If someone fancies a holiday to Fiji for instance, what are the chances of the thrown in 'free' holiday meeting one's requirements? Practically none. Such incentives simply shout 'desperate seller - offer low!' loud and clear I know the markets are suffering, but personally, I don't think this is the way to go. I would hate it myself.

Robbo25

We have sold our house five times since March this year, and this last one is£38,000 less than we first sold it for and £33,000 less than we bought it for two and a half years ago.

The reality is that whatever you are trying to sell, the only value is the one that someone is willing to pay. So it may be that if you haven't already you really need to drop your drawers so to speak to a point that will fulfil your ambitions or re-evaluate your plans.

The market really is very very tough but as always if something is priced right then it will sell.

traciridgwell

Trouble is Robbo - you can't just afford to give your home away and still pay off debts! You still need money to get out to New Zealand with! There is only so much some people can drop without totally compromising their dreams and reality of still having living expenses when they get to NZ!
Its tough - especially when its just extremely bad timing for most of us!

Robbo25

I do know and it is really really harsh and I know how lucky we are even though it has been pretty painful still. I guess I am just saying what we all know, the market is sh** and we are all going to lose a packet if we want to follow our goals in the immediate future.

Moomoo

We put our house on the market in February with some initial viewings. Then it went quiet for ages. We dropped the price by £25,000 in the meantime, but still no sale. We then decided that we would put the house up for rental. Within a week of it being advertised, we had three viewings on one day and one of the viewers went to the estate agents that afternoon and put a holding deposit on it. So we have now let the house from the end of August for initially 12-18 months (hopefully 2 years), and we will see what the market is like then for selling. Scary thing is, we are not ready to submit our ITA for a couple of weeks, and we have to be out of our house shortly after we have submitted it. We are staying with family, so there is no problem, but we were in a situation of either go with the let and wait for the visas, or get the visas and possibly not being able to progress because of the house. Ironic thing is, our lettees are from New Zealand and Australia. How weird is that?