Heard back from Persimmon earlier today. That’s two days after the third valuation, and despite chasing on my part. What a bunch of muppets. And the news has not been good.

First, the plot/house that we wanted has been reserved by someone else. That’s not a huge problem, we were prepared for that, and they’re building the same house type on other developments that we’ve looked at, and could go to instead.

The bigger problem is that it is, apparently, company policy that they don’t do part-exchanges on properties that have had garage conversions carried out.

Now either they’re

1. incompetent, or
2. lying

Incompetent, because I told them that the garage had been converted before they arranged for valuations — so if this is the truth then why did they bother wasting my time with the valuations. Even if they didn’t notice that I’d told them about the converted garage the first valuation would have mentioned it, so why bother arranging for two more?

Or, they’re just lying, and they don’t want to deal with the part-ex hassle.

If they’re lying then I don’t want to deal with them. And if they’re incompetent I don’t want to deal with them either.

Back to square one.

Rats. I’m at a training session with Sun tomorrow, so the third valuation has had to postponed until Wednesday.

Persimmon have said that the third valuation is needed because the other two valuations were wildly different. I know they’re lying through their teeth because I spoke to both chaps doing the valuation, and they each said I could expect 250,000 for it. I expect this is Persimmon trying to soften us up before offering us a low valuation. As I said in an earlier entry, if they do that, we’ll be having

Wandered back over to the development again this evening. Partly to wander around the show-home again. We’ve seen so many houses over the past 4 weeks or so that it’s important to take the time and make sure that the one we’ve chosen really is the one we want.

And we think it is — a lot of the others have had niggles. Like the one we saw last Friday night; quite a big place, nice garden, but let down by some details which you’d think would be obvious. For example:

* One small recessed light in the big ensuite bathroom, which also featured a shower tucked away between a screen. That’s just going to be too dark, and fixing it would require digging up in to the ceiling after buying the place.

* A utility room off the kitchen that’s only got space for a single under-the-counter appliance. So you can have your washing machine or your tumble drier in there, but not both of them (and there’s no place in the kitchen as designed to put the other appliance)

* Only four plug sockets in the lounge. I mean, really.

But the Persimmon design does work. And we’ve reassured ourselves on that again. That, and the finish (at least the visible part of it) still holds up to scrutiny. The finish on some of the show homes that we’ve seen has been atrocious (yes, McCann Homes, I’m looking at you) so we know they can get the finish right at least some of the time.

The other reason for going up there was to look at the actual plot and get a feel for the size of the garden, and all the other bits and pieces that you don’t get just looking at a plan.

This has highlighted a handful of areas of concern. For one thing, we’re responsible for a large chunk of the shared road in to our little cul-de-sac, which might prove costly. And we’re not too sure how the edge of the property boundary is going to be finished — is there going to be a fence, or a wall? Do we get any say in it? So these and other questions have all been written down and we’ll tackle Persimmon with them when the final valuation’s in.

In the meantime we’re hedging our bets. We’ve found another Persimmon development which has some houses of the same design available in case things go wrong with this one, and we’ve identified a couple of other new build sites and designs which, on paper at least, could work. So we’ll call the developers tomorrow to get more information.

Persimmon want a third valuation. I suspect they’re a bit concerned that the previous two have been too high, and want something smaller to beat us down with. That’s scheduled for next Tuesday.

Had two separate estate agents around to value my place today. Quite an informal process, which was something of a shock. I was expecting serious men with measuring tapes, surveying equipment, and so on.

Instead had two quite pleasant chaps over, a couple of hours apart. The valuation consisted of showing them around and stating the obvious; “Yes, this is the bathroom. Here’s a bedroom. Here’s another bedroom” and so on.

After doing a bit of research on the lazyweb I figured that the valuation was going to be in the region of 220-240,000. Turns out 250,000 is more like it — something to do with having 3 double bedrooms, instead of 2 double bedrooms and a box room, which is common for the area. That, and the previous owners had done a bang up job converting the garage in to a playroom for their little girl (which is now doing stirling duty as my office).

Of course, this may cause problems with Persimmon — they want the part-ex property to be at least 30% cheaper than the house we’re buying, which means mine shouldn’t really be valued at more than 236,600 for them to consider it. But I figure (a) there are other developers who are happy with a 20% difference, so 30% isn’t necessarily a hard and fast rule, and (b) we can always horse-trade about this, and try and extract fifteen grand’s worth of upgrades from Persimmon for the new place.

Time will tell.

… I’m trying to buy a house. My current domicile is a bit too small for my girlfriend and children, and the neighbourhood — although fine for a bachelor about town — is not quite where you’d choose to bring up two girls.

This is proving to be something of a tricky business. Do I sell mine off (with all the attendant hassle of dealing with estate agents, buyers, chains, and so on) but collect a wodge of cash with which to buy a new place?

Do I hang on to it, rent it out, coin it that way, but lumber myself with a big mortgage and deal with the uncertainties of the rental market over the long term? To say nothing of the associated hassles of being a landlord and finding tenants, keeping the place up to date, spending half the annual rent income on the sort of emergencies that are bound to crop up…?

Or perhaps buy a new-build, where they’ll part-exchange (so solving the whole ‘having to sell mine and deal with a chain’) but have to worry about the quality of new-build homes in the UK which is oft reported as being poor?

After sitting down with my SO it looks like new-build is the way to go. If (and this could well be a big “if”) things go to plan the process should be fairly smooth. I won’t need to move out of my place until the new one is built, and, armed with lots of useful consumer research information we should be able to ensure that we don’t get stuck with a badly built lemon of a house.

So we’ve been looking around for the past couple of weeks and think we’ve found a style of house and developer (Persimmon) we can deal with. We think. So over the coming months I’m planning on chronicling the process here. Hopefully this might be useful information to someone in the future, and maybe someone reading an entry might be able to offer up a word or two of wisdom.