Moving Home

One thing I’m sure of this year is that I’m moving home. We’ve accepted an offer to buy the home we’ve lived in since 2005. So sometime in the spring we will very definitely be moving home.

Moving Home

Last summer I got promoted, and the new job is based in the Glasgow office. Thanks to the pandemic the fact I started in October hasn’t been a huge issue. I’ve had five days in the office, two of which have been in Glasgow and three in London. However one day the pandemic will end and I’ll want a slightly shorter commute for the times I need to be in an office.

Since September we’ve been watching the housing market in Scotland. It’s possible that we’ve seen every single house that’s been advertised in the central belt with four or more bedrooms. What this has done is surfaced a realistic set of requirements. We’ve also got a better grip of the pricing vs. offers.

Offers Over

One of the peculiarities of the Scottish system is that (almost) no-one advertises their house at the price they want. Most houses have an ‘offers over’ price. The last time we bought a flat in Scotland it was a lottery. Since then there’s been a mandatory Home Report done by the seller. This has to include a market valuation.

We’ve been told that typically there’s about £5-10,000 difference between the offers over price on the listing and the home report value. Although lately that’s been coming down. The reason for that is high demand. Properties seem to be going for between £10,000 to £20,000 more than the home report value. Some are going for even more than that. We were really interested in one place that was advertised as offers over £309.995. The home report put the market price at £325,000. Normally this would put it at the upper end of what we could afford. However the estate agent told us that there had been offers, and that their client had said they wanted it to start with a 4! This is unusual though.

New Home

What we’re looking for is something a little bigger than our four bedroom semi-detached house in Surrey that we’ve been living in. In part this is so that there’s room for a permanent office for working from home. We’ve got a pretty wide area we’re looking at, anywhere within a 90 minute commute of central Glasgow arriving for 0845 on a weekday.

Although we’ve got a week planned in the Feb half-term to see places, we still haven’t been able to book anything in. All the places we’ve been interested in have been sold within a week or so.