This project was an absolute gem, its located just outside Nottingham in a university town called Beeston. We brought it back in 2017 it is a great place to buy in Nottingham as it is covered by a different council to the city meaning it had no article 4 in place! since 2017 prices in the area have gone crazy and with the council suggesting article 4 is incoming it looks as though prices are going to rocket even more.
I managed to secure this property for the bargain price of £125,000, even though at the time people were paying between £150,000 and £170,000 for similar large Victorian properties. The reason for such a discount was that this property had gone stale. Often what you will find when looking for properties is that people put all their effort into always trying to view anything first. When sometimes if something has been on the market for some time because of poor advertising or fall throughs people just don’t bother to go and look, they assume there is something wrong with the property. I mean they must be right, it’s been on the market for 7 months! However most of the time that’s not the case and that is how they go stale.
You can search for these opportunities by arranging your Rightmove search to the oldest listed (you can do that in the top corner of the page) from there do the usual routine of saving the ones that look of interest and then calling the agent. You can see how long the property has been listed for just above the map on the right hand side. Sometimes it’s because the agents are lazy and haven’t taken the advert down, but most of the time the listing has just gone stale. It’s always fun to call the agent when looking at older listings like this. Most of the time they have forgotten about them. They say things like “I’m not sure were still doing viewings on that one” or even, “I’m new sorry that was here before I joined, I don’t know much about it”
Once you find these kinds of opportunities act as though they have just been listed and get in as soon as you can. There is good opportunity here as in theory the vendors would have some motivation as the property will have been for sale for some time.
But do remember that whilst some people mess around haggling for £2k off the purchase price, others offer asking and secure things quickly. After all if it’s a good deal it’s a good deal. People often need that token couple of thousand off to proceed, almost like it’s a mini win on the negotiating front. That may work with properties that are old listings but with the way the market is currently agents are putting some properties on the market just lower than what they expect the property to sell for. Everyone then goes mad for it and get themselves into a bidding war pushing the price up often back over original estimated market value. But that can only happen if you wait around offering 2k less than asking allowing the agent to book more viewings in and invite your competition around. A good way to combat this is to ask the agent prior to submitting the offer, what do I need to pay to get it off the market today?
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Before
After
That’s exactly what I said to secure this deal, we brought at £125,000 spent £75,000 on adding value through physical space such as loft conversion with dormer extension turning a 3 bedroom semi into a 6 bedroom 4 bathroom HMO. It grosses £2835PCM When complete we managed to get a refinance figure of £295,000 using Shawbrook. Pretty successful. And to think this property had been on the market for 4 months and no one wanted it! A similar property to this sold a few weeks ago for £220k which needed complete refurbishment and the loft conversion with dormer adding. That just shows you the demand for this kind of stock now.