This tool is amazing. Property Bee is a fantastic add on for your browser that enables you to follow properties on rightmove and see when information has changed.
You need to use firefox browser for it and install it from Property bee’s website. I use this and it’s fantastic fun! If you’re at work you might have to ask permission from your boss.
You need to ensure you’re showing changes in the Styles drop down box and that you’re working in a bee on the options drop down box on the Property Bee Toolbar.
Once you’ve got it set up you can browse various property websites and see the data collected by other people and it’ll keep the changes you spot and add them to the history of the property.
It does have a few failings – when a property is taken off rightmove and put back on it doesn’t keep it’s history. This is a shame but if you store properties in your favourites on rightmove you can see the brief info about the property stored there.
If rightmove changes it’s site layout it ceases to work too until the inventor creates an update. This rarely takes long though. The tool is free to use but feel free to send the maker a donation!
So what do you see?
You’ll see new changes in yellow and the day after they change to blue. They get listed plain after that. This makes it easy to spot changes and see how long the property has been on the market.
It works on rightmove.co.uk, daft.ie, propertynews.com, espc.co.uk, gspc.co.uk, sspc.co.uk and primelocation.com.
It really is a brilliant tool if you’re looking to buy a house!
Time on market – a key indicator for the housing market?
How long it takes to sell a house is one factor that you need to consider when looking at the state of the housing market.
There’s one site that shows this data in an easy to use form. It’s at Home.co.uk – and you can drill down through local information for your area and see lots of useful information. They list the most popular estate agents according to the number of properties they’re marketing, show sold data in nice graphs and of course the Time on Market graphs.
This graph shows the Average Time On Market By Type in Oldham (days). You can search for your area using the little search box on the left too.
This shows that in January 2007 the average time on market was 125 days for all properties and now it’s 312 days. This might give hope to some people who’ve been trying to sell their house for some time.
The biggest increase has been for terraced properties which took only 88 days back in January 2007 but now sit on the market for 332 days. That’s a huge increase of 277%!
This sort of information is useful to house buyers too although there’s a more useful tool we’ll be telling you about soon called property bee that will really open up your eyes!
House for sale in Newton Surmaville
There’s a beautiful Grade 1 listed property for sale in Newton Surmaville, near Yeovil, in Somerset. It really is beautiful.
Picture 2 shows peacocks on the lawn, Picture 4 shows an amazing ceiling and it’s a wonderful house. It has fantastic gardens, a huge greenhouse and kitchen garden. It was built in 1608 by Robert Harbin who bought Newton House that was there and knocked it down and built the house that is there today!
The brochure’s first picture is of the front door which is set in a soft yellow stone buttress almost. It’s one of the prettiest houses for sale on rightmove at the moment and I’d love to take a tour round it!
The house on the British Listed building site
PrimeLocation App on the iPad
The PrimeLocation App on the iPad is easy to use.
It is free to download and use this app.
The app works in landscape mode only. The start screen has a search box for you to type in the location and to pick to buy or to rent. There are more options; this includes type of property, minimum bedrooms, maximum bedrooms, price range, search area and whether to show results in price ascending or descending.
The search has two display options – one a spiral and the other a card view. I quite like the spiral display but it’s not quite as sensible a layout to use as the card view.
You swipe the screen to change properties or click on the arrows. Whilst swiping seems to be a natural directional use for the navigation the arrows use the same directionality too. This means to see the next property you click the left arrow which to my mind is wrong… Swipe or click and view the different properties until you get to one you like. Click on the picture of the house and you’ll see the details with a link to see the full details on the primelocation site or to share the details by email.
The email contains the details and a link which is quite nice if you want to keep a record of the houses you’re interested in.
When you view the property on the primelocation site you still have an option to return to the results – this is at the bottom of the screen on the left making it easy to get back to see more properties.
Press the close button to return to more properties on the search results.
The app allows you to refine your search results but doesn’t have a map feature which many other apps do. It is an interesting way of viewing properties though.
House at Menai Bridge, Gwynedd
This is a stunning 16 bedroom house at Menai Bridge, Gwynedd.
The view of it from across the strait is amazing and it’s in a great location if you’d like to live on Anglesea. It is close to the main road though – if you google map it you’ll see the roof tops quite clearly from the road.
Plas Rhianfa was built in 1849 and has tons of amazing gothic charm! It’s not just the roofline that’s amazing, but inside are some amazing stairs, fireplaces and ceilings!
Relocation Relocation Review
Last night’s episode – a couple looking to buy a Scottish hotel.
They looked at several nice hotels, one was too small and another was mostly pub with the ratio of income being 50% of income from bar drinks, 35% from food and only 15% from rooms ! Luckily Phil pointed out they’d wanted to be hoteliers not landlords!
They should have bought the one that made 60k a year profit a year and was closed 5 months of it too! That sounded like a cushy deal!
Whilst I watched it last night I thought the finance aspect wasn’t touched on very much – where repayment of the loan came into it who knows… if you have to pay your mortgage out of the profit then you have no money to fritter on nice stuff.
I thought buying a “bust” property and keeping on the staff was a stupid idea. Surely it can’t provide for 5 full time wages? I’d have thought the only way of doing it would be to have both working like loonies and trying to get some cheap help. Having a “hotel manager” who’d managed it into the ground sounded like a really awful idea.
He didn’t want to do front of house – so is he a trained chef – one would hope he had some experience! Who knows though – but it certainly made interesting TV for an hour and I learnt a few things too! That Scotland has 2000 hotels! That there’s a less touristy side of Loch Ness and that there’s some pretty nice looking hotels up there!
If you’d like to watch it yourself you can by clicking here and guess what? If you’d like to see their hotel then visit The Royal on Lochan run by Keith and Christine Bettis.
Crime rate maps
What crime rates are in your area?
This Met Police site shows crime rates.
Crime mapper shows England and Wales counties crime rates.
Energy Performance Certificates
Energy Performance Certificates can be useful for working out how energy efficient a house is and how hard it is to heat them in winter. There are several opinions as to whether they accurately reflect the true nature of a house’s energy use and warmth.
You need one before you can sell your house.
The main part of the certificate that people usually look at is the rating. This is from A-G and shows the current rating and what it could be if improvement work was done.
There are many flaws within the scheme – such as low energy lightbulbs are included in the rating – but obviously someone might take them with them when they move. However low energy bulbs are frequently on offer and even available free from energy companies.
Landlords need them for rental properties too and this can be helpful if you’re looking to move to an easy to heat property and cut your energy bills. Always make sure you ask to see the EPC. Letting agents and landlords should show it you without being prompted but if they don’t, then ask.
Some propertys can not be vastly improved. Buildings without a cavity can not have cavity wall insulation. In some areas window restrictions due to the area being a conservation zone might mean the cost of appropriate double glazed windows is too expensive.
Easy things like loft insulation and draft proofing can often make a difference though. The list of recommendations can be interesting. Some EPC are often based on guesswork which can be frustrating if they have assumed no cavity wall insulation but there actually is.
You should also have within this an estimate of bills and energy use.
There’s a summary of the home’s energy performance related features such as:
walls – whether they are cavity filled.
What type of roof it is and what insulation is had.
What type of floor is it.
What the windows are
What the main heating and it’s controls are.
Whether there is secondary heating.
What the hot water system is.
What the lighting is.
It should also state if there are any low or zero carbon energy sources. That’s things like solar hotwater or photovoltaic cells, or ground heat pumps, or wood burning stoves.
An energy performance certificate is worth looking at and checking the information on it yourself or asking a surveyor to check certain aspects.
London property tool
Commute from is a really odd looking site that helps you wrk out how long your commute across London will be. Probably quite useful but I’ve not tested it against real times to tell for sure!
It’s main feature is that it shows you which stations are within your preferred commute time of the central London tube station you use for work!
The Rightmove App
The Rightmove App on the iPad is an easy way of browsing Rightmove’s houses for sale.
Whilst you can view individual houses on the iPad from a link you can’t use the actual Rightmove website in Safari to locate houses – you have to get the app. The app is free though and is easy to use.
You can type in a postcode, town or county name just as you can on rightmove. The search filters are available to help you define price, range, number of bedrooms and whether you want to see the SSTC properties too.
You view the properties on a map which can be zoomed in or out so you can further define your area. You see the houses shown a few at a time and can scroll through this list to see them all. By zooming in you narrow your area of search and this reduces the numbers of properties shown making it easier to work out which ones you are interested in.
Clicking on a property takes you to the property detail page that has the extra photos and information as well as contact details for the agent. Some pages are better than others and links to other material don’t always work on the iPad. You can add properties to favourites though or email lnks to them to yourself or friends to share the ones you like.
Using Rightmove on the iPad is easy and you’ll find yourself browsing houses on it all the time!
Rightmove’s filters are easy to apply on this and it remembers locations you’ve browsed already in a drop down list so you can revist them easily.
Overall it’s a fun and easy app to use and will help you browse for houses!