Advice: Buying an house

[Paul_S]

Wouldn't that entail getting a property report of every house in your area? Surely that's not financially viable.

LightStone can provide a property report for a suburb.
http://www.lightstone.co.za/Portal/...s/Online-Property-Reports/--Suburb-Report-_20

A R35 report contains:

Sales Activity: A table showing the sales activity for the suburb in the last 3 and 12 months respectively, arranged by:
Transaction Type - new and repeat residential sales
Property Type - freehold, sectional title and estate
Price Bands - <R400k, R400-R800k, R800k-R1.5m, R1.5-R3.0m and >R3.0m

Bond Market Activity: A table detailing the bond registration activity for the suburbs in the last 3 and 12 months respectively, categorised by:
Bond Type - ordinary loans, further advances, switches and total registrations
Bank or Lending Institution

Suburb Trends Analysis for recent years, per property type, and highlighting the suburb's trends of:
Average Sales Prices
Sales Volume / Number of Sales

Graphical representation of the Tenure of Owners as well as the Age of Residents and their movements in and out of the suburb (current owners, recent buyers and sellers)

Very interesting reading and I think R35 is quite affordable.
I found out that the average age of property owners in my street is over 60 and that my house was priced about R400K below the average prices in the area.

 

[Beachless]

Some of you guys don't see things from the sellers's perspective. Not everybody is trying to make a quick buck. Sellers have to factor in agent's fees, cost of renovations, recovering initial capital expenditure etc. They then instruct the agent to list the property at the list price.

If you list it too high to allow for price negotiation, nobody bites. If you factor in price negotiations and list it at the selling price, then people still want to bargain, and the seller makes a loss. And it's not like house prices have skyrocketed in the past few years, so any profit is usually very minimal.

Jeez, if you want something and provided that there is nothing wrong with it, then just pay the damn price. If everyone did that, then we wouldn't have this convoluted mess where nobody actually knows what a property is worth.

As was said earlier in this thread, your property is worth only what someone else is prepared to pay for it.

This goes for every single thing on the market(unless someone gave you a guarantee of some sort).

If you don't want to sell for a loss then you need to wait for the market to strengthen(unless you foresee other circumstances where the value will decline further then you take your losses and run)

 

[fdaniels]

Great advice in this thread!

I offered the listing price because I thought that it was more than the listing price. I haven't seen another place that ticks all the boxes my wife and I drew up. It may not be perfect for everyone but it was perfect for us.

I am not going to fight for this place though, if the seller doesn't accept that is his problem. There are tons of nice places out there in my range range.