How many photos do you expect on estate agent details?
A record has been spotting 100 photos on one property on righmove recently.
Does it vary according to how much the property is for sale for? If a house is on sale for £50,000 then are you happy to see only 4 photos? If a property is on at £1,000,000 are you happy to see only 4 photos?
If you’re selling a house you might be trying to balance enticing people to view with preventing people being nosey. You only have a limited time to interest people in viewing your property. The more properties in your area for sale that are similar to yours then the harder you will have to try.
What are the photos like? Did you get a chance to approve them before they went live on the estate agents website? Can you ask to have them redone? A good estate agent should ensure you are happy with the photos and might even make suggestions as to minor changes to enable good photos to be taken.
Whilst decluttering is one idea, you can sometimes make photos seem better by having side lights on. A good photographer will take plenty of photos and make sure they have some good ones.
When you view a property’s details and see only a few photos, what do you think? It’s easy to assume that the rest of the property is tired and dated if you can’t see pictures of it. If bedrooms aren’t shown then you always wonder why. Likewise if a house doesn’t have its outside shown as the first picture it seems to break the unwritten convention on this. It also causes some distrust amongst house viewers. When you view a house in real life you will immediately see the outside of it, so hiding it by not adding a picture can start off the viewing on a bad note.
It also begs the question, that if the front of your house is not photogenic, then perhaps you should do something to improve it.
Grand Designs House Boat
More4 Viewers were treated last night to watching an episode different from the advertised one. In light of the house boat washing up on shore they decided to show that episode.
Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud called it “more of a floating Scrapheap Challenge” than a houseboat at the time.
It’s series 7 episode 3 “The Eco-Barge” – hopefully you will be able to find this soon at Ch4 4onD
Record number of photos in Rightmove
This one has 100 photos on Rightmove! It’s a very grand house near Morecambe It’s a beautiful Georgian house that was built between 1795 and 1798.
Quernmore Park Hall is a 15 bedroom country house
You’ll need a bit of money in the bank to buy it as it’s £4,500,000
And it’s located in Quernmore Park, LA2
Rockbeare Manor
This is an amazing Grade 1 listed house called Rockbeare Manor
Not only is the house listed but its park and surroundings are one of few registered by English Heritage as being of National Historic Interest.
The house is stunning not only from the outside where it’s enormous white curved shape stands magnificently tall overlooking the 106 acres, but it’s also beautiful inside. It is worthy of being labelled a stately home!
Visit it’s listing on British Listed Buildings – it has quite a detailed history included in the listing which makes for fascinating reading. The property dates from the mid 18th century but has been added to over the years as is often the way.
The stair case is huge – very wide and with beautifully curved banisters. As well as a lake, stables and many beautiful rooms it also has a squash court!
See this property on Streetview – well the gates anyway!
Police Crime Maps available
After a bleak start where the demand crashed the servers, the police crime maps are now accessible.
I think these will really change the way smart people look for a house. Whilst before you could tour an area at weekends at night to see how much activity there was, you now get an idea of how much actual anti-social behaviour there is now.
It does only show reported crime though and there is some worry that people will stop reporting crime in order to make their area look better. However I think this is self-defeating. If you have a problem with anti-social behaviour it’s often evident. From groups of youths hanging about, graffiti, to litter and broken glass. A wise house buyer will already have been pricing up car and home insurance before moving too – that way you get no surprises at all.
I think it’s a positive thing as it really shows the detail you need to allow you to be prepared for any problems. If you see one street has a high anti-social problem then when you drive down it you might realise it’s got a corner shop where kids hang out on. This might be a problem if you live near the shop but streets a bit further away will probably be fine!
I hope these maps will actually encourage people to report crime and get villains locked up. Often it’s just one person who can cause lots of problems and once they’re dealt with you get peace and quiet and a lot less crime.
When you’re buying a hosue though it will allow you to see a snap shot of crime only – but if you print out (or screen grab and save the images) on a regular basis you’ll build up a more complete picture of what crime is in an area. One bad month doesn’t mean it’s a bad area, it might have just been a one off incident causing the issues.
As with all major purchases buying a house is a huge decision and not one to be rushed into lightly. If you’re buying a house or about to put an offer in, then look at the crime maps, and the cost of insurance there. Compare where you live now and see whether it’s more or less. Perhaps keep looking and don’t rush into buying that house now, but wait a month and look at the next month’s crime data too.
Some crimes happen because of people not taking proper precautions. A house with an alarm and locked up each time you go out is less likely to be broken into. A car left on the drive with the engine running is more likely to be stolen then if you sit in the car whilst waiting for the windows to demist.
Look for areas that are in home watch schemes too – or consider starting one. Sometimes something as simple as neighbours getting together can start to make a difference to an area.
Sold prices of property
There are several sites that you can look up sold property prices on. The land registry doesn’t publish prices of properties that are “sold under market value” so excludes repos and auction properties. It can also exclude properties sold to companies.
I do feel this is slightly dishonest and that all house price data should be available freely. After all something sells for market value at the price it sells for. It is also artificially inflating property prices by excluding lower prices sold at.
My favourite site to view them on is HousePrices.co.uk – this site allows you to put in a general area, postcode, street name and town to find the house prices.
Of course if a property isn’t listed then it doesn’t mean it hasn’t sold. Some properties just don’t show up. You can view the sale price usually by paying £4 to the land registry to see the title information of the property – but if you want to know a lot of houses that aren’t listed then it could easily get expensive.
It allows you to view in 10, 25, 50 or 100 results at a time. You can follow a street or postcode by asking for an email each time results are updated. This happens at the start of every month usually.
It gives you the sale date, sale price, type (detached or semi or terraced) and whether it’s freehold or leasehold and whether it’s new build or not. It gives the full address of properties too so is useful for looking up postcodes of places too. You can also viuew the current value or the property and see property for sale nearby. These links take you to zoopla.
Official launch of Police Crime maps
Police crime maps have been officially launched today – 1st February. They have been up and running for a while but it’s official today! They’re really useful. So useful that you’ll wish you’d had access to the data years ago.
Type in the area you’re looking to buy in and you get a street by street breakdown of crime and types of crime. Fantastic for spotting rogue roads that might look all nice and quiet during the day – but will reveal the levels of crime including anti-social behaviour. It only shows the previous months though and we’re not sure they plan to archive data. You might want to learn to do screen grabs of the page or even print it out – especially if you’re trying to achieve a discount on the asking price of a property. Or you might even want to not buy a property when you discover what goes on around there!
It’s an amazing piece of data displaying that will show you the nice sides of towns and the dodgy sides. Someone on the BBC news was worried it might affect house prices! Too right it will! As well as lowering the prices in rough areas, it might however put prices up in quiet areas!
It’s well worth looking at the areas you’re interested in buying a house in! Fantastic stuff!
Peter Jones – Dragon – selling his house
Peter Jones from the BBC program Dragon’s Den is selling his home.
His house was built in 2002 and is a 6 bedroom detached place in Beaconsfield.
Peter Jones House link is perfectly decluttered so there’s no personal photos about. There’s a study though where you might conjure up some fantastic business ideas!
House near Dulverton
This amazing house near Dulverton is stunning! It’s actually got several appartments that make up the house, but you could use it all as one house, or have it partly let out as holiday lets!
Knapp house has a cinema room and a gym and lots of outdoor space.
The property is currently advertised as holiday lets on this site Knapp House which shows you a few more views.
If you look on google streetmap you’ll see the entrance way to the house with the name Knapp on the gateposts.
It’s a charming house and was built in about 1907. It was used in the past as a school. The grounds have an orchard, barbeque area and equestrian area with stables. It’s perfect for country living and is situated in a quiet part of Devon close to Exmoor.
This house is on my wish list!
Zoopla Property App on the iPad
The Zoopla app is free on the iPad.
It only works in portrait mode. It does ask to use your current location when you start it up but then doesn’t always seem to use it for anything.
It’s default is the map view but there’s other options including a hybrid and a list mode. Type in your search and it takes you to a map view. It also doesn’t seem to remember the names of places you’ve typed in which makes it frustrating to have to type in names again.
The hybrid view shows satelite image with roads overlaid on it. The map view is just a road map style. The list doesn’t show any map at all but listed the properties in price order.
The properties are shown as purple pins stuck in a map and you click on them to see the brief detail which includes number of bedrooms and property type and price. You then click on the arrow to see more details.
From the details page you get more info, and the agent’s phone number and you can request details by email.
You can also ‘star’ the property as a favourite. THere is an option for viewing favourites at the bottom of the main screen. There’s also options for showing rentals, values and sold prices which makes it a useful app for doing more detailed price research.
The price trends chart shows landscape and just to confuse you it turns if you rotate the pad. It’s got the sold prices for the different types of residential property in the area over the last few years. It is useful to compare to previous years and shows you the property peak prices in 08/09.
This is vaguely useful info but not as good as looking up previous sold prices for that particular property.