Reviewing the housing market in 2021

There is a lot of choice in the housing market. In 2019 over 800,000 houses were sold in England and Wales. With this much choice, where do you start looking for your perfect home? Random searching online may be fun for an hour but can soon end in frustration.

‍Use our process below to quickly find your perfect home.

What’s your budget?

Before you do anything, you need to know what you can afford. Use an online mortgage calculator to work out your budget.

Decide what you need

Before you start wasting time looking at castles in Scotland, flats in London and cottages by the sea, decide what you need in your home. This will quickly narrow down your search criteria and mean you only spend time on houses that could become your perfect home.

Use our Home Buyers Checklist to help you decide what you need.

Location, Location, Location

Use a map to identify the areas where you need to be. Do you need to be near family? Do you need to work in a specific area?

Once you have identified the places you need to be, decide how long you are willing to travel to get to them. Are you willing to commute for ten minutes, half an hour or an hour? Also think about how you travel; if you need to get a train to work, what towns are on the same train line?

You now have a list of towns that you are willing to live in.

Affordability

There are websites, including Home.co.uk that enable you to see the average cost of homes in a town (including breakdowns by number of bedrooms).

Look up the towns you are willing to live in and identify those that fall within your budget. Remember this is the average price, so don’t rule out places that are just above budget, as some houses will still be within your budget.

Visit the towns

You probably have 4 or 5 towns that are in the area you want to live and are within your budget, but which one do you want to live in?

Go out and visit the towns. Walk around and see what the amenities are like: where is the gym, where is the school, what supermarkets does it have? Do you feel safe walking around?

Make sure you visit the suburbs and not just the town centre. Are there any that you really want to or don’t want to live in?

Research the towns

Now you know where you want to live, you can do a quick bit of further research by looking up the local crime rates at Crime In My Area and schools at GOV.UK .

You can also become a member of local Facebook groups. You can then either post a question or see the types of things people moan about. This will give you the locals’ view of the area.

Look at houses

Now you know the couple of areas that you want to live in, it’s time to start looking for houses. There are three main house sale websites in the UK:

• Rightmove
• OnTheMarket
•  Zoopla

Use your Home Buyers Checklist and search for properties in the areas you want to live in.

All the sites let you search by town, price and number of bedrooms, and most have mapping tools where you can zoom in on the parts of town you want to live in.

Pick your future home

Now it’s time to view some houses and hopefully find one you want to buy.

In our next blog we will be looking at how to view a property. Follow us on Facebook and Linked in to keep updated on all our blogs.

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Mortgages:

Batsrock Limited, trading as Stag Protect, acts as an intermediary for the purposes of introducing its customers to Yes Mortgage Services Limited, part of the H L Partnership.

YES Mortgage Services Limited is an appointed representative of H L Partnership Limited which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. YES Mortgages Services Limited is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 08872874. The registered office address is Yes Mortgage Services Limited, Four Winds, 22 Windmill Lane, Avon Castle, Ringwood, Hampshire, BH24 2DQ.

You will not receive advice or any recommendation from Batsrock Financial. Such services will be provided by Yes Mortgage Services Limited.