How Many Days Does It Take to Sell a Royal Tunbridge Wells Home?

Whether you are a Tunbridge Wells homeowner, first-time buyer or landlord; the last 15 months has been a roller coaster ride when it comes to the Tunbridge Wells property market.

With 213,120 UK house buyers and 58,580 UK tenants moving home in June, the summer has been manic for many people. Meaning some homeowners are asking if they should be staying put? Or should they wait for the best home to come onto the market before putting their home up for sale or find a buyer but be unable to find a property – it’s all rather confusing.

Then we have some landlords in the area who are asking themselves if they should buy another property investment (and some even wondering if they should sell and cash in on the boom) and then finally, with 95% mortgages back, first-time buyers are asking if they should look to take the plunge and buy their first home or wait.

In this article, I hope I can help you with the decisions you might want to make and to navigate this unusual post lockdown housing market. Let me start with some stats to show you what is happening at the moment in Tunbridge Wells.

The average time it takes to sell a property locally in this housing market is 47 days.

Interesting when compared with nearby Southborough at 25 days, Tonbridge at 49 days, Wadhurst at 23 days and Crowborough at 21 days.

Look back five years, it took 103 days on average to sell a Tunbridge Wells home – the local property market is now certainly ‘cooking on gas’!

The property market has certainly solidified a little over the last few weeks. The Stamp Duty holiday rush has seen its run and the pent-up post-Brexit and more importantly post-lockdown demand has receded and although I am still observing competing offers on most properties I look at, I certainly get a feeling of a small shift in the balance-of-power between the seller and buyer.

Many people have put their house hunting on hold as they go on their first holiday since 2019, be that glamping in Cornwall or having days out on a ‘staycation’. That means between now and mid-September, depending on what type of property you are looking for, many buyers could well discover that there are fewer competitors for their next home than there might be.

Also, July and August are notoriously barren months for estate agents putting new properties up for sale. Yet since the typical ‘seasonal property market’ is so out of kilter as a result of the pandemic, many agents are taking on a decent number of very good properties now, which is not something that characteristically would have happened in the summer months.

The important thing is not to wait for the property to hit the portals (i.e. Rightmove etc). Yet research shows, nearly 5 out of 6 people who bought their home were not on the agents mailing list before they viewed the home they eventually bought. That’s OK in a normal property market as you can wait until it hits Rightmove or Zoopla, yet these are unprecedented times and if you are not on an agent’s mailing list - you will miss out on properties.

If you don’t put yourself on the agent’s mailing lists, you could end up losing out on the property of your dreams.

So, the question is should you put your home on the market first or wait for the right property to come along?

Roll the clock back a few years and it was standard practice for people to wait for their dream home to come onto the market, then put theirs on and hope that it would sell in time. This housing market is different and only those who are in a position to proceed (cash buyers or those sold subject to contract) will be considered as serious buyers.

Yet, nobody wants to be homeless if they do sell.

Estate agents are returning back to their old skills from the 1980s and 1990s by chain building. By starting at the bottom of the chain of the smaller house and building up a chain, waiting for everybody to find their next homes, nobody need be made homeless.

This is not an issue because most house sales are taking on average between 20 and 25 weeks and as long as everybody communicates with each other and everyone knows where they are, then normally things go through, albeit slower. Can you believe it – estate agents really are earning their money with this!

So what Tunbridge Wells homes are selling the fastest?

Tunbridge Wells Terraced and Town Houses are selling in 27 days

Tunbridge Wells Semi-Detached Houses are selling in 32 days

Tunbridge Wells Detached Houses are selling in 27 days

Tunbridge Wells Apartments are selling in 62 days

Tunbridge Wells landlords, maybe there are some bargains to be had with some apartments with that length of time on the market? Again, do your homework or even consider picking up the phone to me for a chat.

So, there you have it. The lessons I hope you have now learnt from this are to put yourself on agent’s mailing lists, talk to agents about your requirements so you get a heads up first when a property is coming onto the market (don’t just do everything over a computer screen) and once you have found a property be a little bit more patient with how long it takes to build a chain and then get the property through to an exchange and completion so you get the keys to your forever home.

Whether you are a Tunbridge Wells homeowner, Tunbridge Wells landlord or first-time buyer and would like some advice and opinion on your circumstances in the current property market, please don’t hesitate to either pick up the phone or drop me a message.

To everyone else, what are your thoughts on the Tunbridge Wells property market?

Royal Tunbridge Wells’ Love (and Hate) Affair with the Semi-Detached House

 

The Semi-Detached House – the icon of middle-class aspiration, the pinnacle of liberalism yet at the same time compromised individuality, the ‘semi’ as it is colloquially termed is, for many Tunbridge Wells homeowners, the highpoint of modern domestic bliss.

Britain’s gift to architecture is the humble ‘Semi-Detached House’. This type of property has been exported around the world with - the ‘Doppel Haus’ in Germany, the ‘Duplex’ in the USA, Canada and Australia.  

For those young, hip and trendy people living in your converted warehouses with strobe lighting and exposed brickwork, you might be surprised to learn that the semi is the dream home of an immense number of Tunbridge Wells people. In fact, it is the most common dwelling type in the British Isles, with 8,060,657 semi-detached homes occupied by Brits alone (representing 31.68% of all occupied property) compared to 23.81% detached, 25.49% terraced and 19.02% flats. 

In Tunbridge Wells alone, there are 6,509 semi-detached houses meaning …

29.2% of properties in Tunbridge Wells are semi-detached.

So, when did the semi-detached house first come into play? Many people think the semi-detached boom started with mass swathes of the suburban mock Tudor bay fronted semis being built between the first and second world wars. The fact is that it was actually rich landowners in the post Great Plague (1665+) years wished to house their farm labourers as inexpensively as possible, yet making their grand estates look as imposing as possible. 

And that’s the point of a semi-detached house. Only half the property is yours, yet you ‘feel’ like you own it all.

The next phase of the semi-detached story, and a phase that really pushed home the point, was many of the late Georgian houses built around the Kensington Gardens area in West London. Many upper-middle class Georgians were wanting something more than the classic Georgian terraced house yet couldn’t afford a large detached home. Therefore, architects took the humble semi-detached house to the next stage of its evolution by masquerading the building itself as one home by slipping its two front doors down opposite sides of the building, making it look like one home from the front, to complete the impression of total ownership.

By Victorian times, semi-detached houses fell out fashion as the railways were building many of them for their railway workers and they became associated with the lower working classes but speculative builders continued building semi-detached homes for the new lower middle class, that is the reason why ultimately the country is full of semi-detached homes today.

The semi-detached house was saved from the annals of history by the Bedford Park development in Ealing (London). Referred to as the world's first ‘garden suburb’ and started in the 1870’s, the architect of Bedford Park used influences of the ‘Aesthetic Movement’, the precursor to the ‘Arts and Craft Movement’ to make the buildings look more pleasing on the eye. The architect also took reference from the style of properties from British history such as Queen Ann to be seen in such features as a sweep of steps leading to a carved stone door, rows of painted sash windows in boxes set flush with the brickwork and bright coloured brickwork with limestone stone quoins emphasising the building’s corner.

As the car enabled people to commute to work from further away, people wanted to get out of the big cities, thus giving rise to the interwar semi, with its mock Tudor fronted, rosemary tiled roof, oak beamed, herringbone brickwork and the leaded and stained glass windowpanes that we all recognise. It was Bedford Park that gave the green light for architects up and down the country to use old styles of building design to make their semi-detached houses look the part.

And now, in more modern times, the semi-detached house has gone from strength to strength.

5,419 of Tunbridge Wells semi-detached houses have changed hands since 1995, many upwards of 5 times (and a handful even more).

The semi continues to appeal, both to big national builders and smaller Tunbridge Wells developers, and most importantly to home buyers. The advantage of semi-detached houses over town houses/terraced houses or apartments is they afford access to their (typically bigger) gardens without having to pass through the house, and they have natural sunlight on three sides of the property, are easily extendable and quite often have a driveway. 

And that’s at the heart of what a semi-detached house is all about, the schism or divide of the semi reveals the tension at the heart of owning your home, which on one side of the coin is a commodity/way to make money and on the other side, a vision to have your own castle, a piece of ground to call your own. It articulates both the craving for personal freedom and the inevitability of socio-economic life. What do I mean by that?

We may dream of owning a castle in many acres, with a drawbridge and moat, yet real life means we can only afford half a building plot sliced out by a volume national builder next to the A26.

I just love a semi-detached house! Style and substance combined.

What are your thoughts? Share your stories and opinions on the humble semi-detached house.

Why Savvy Royal Tunbridge Wells Buy-to-Let Landlords Don’t Use 10-Year Mortgages - And The Reason You Shouldn’t Either

I know of many Tunbridge Wells buy-to-let landlords who fell into property investing by accident. Many didn’t want to sell their family home when the housing market crashed in the Credit Crunch of 2009/10, yet still needed to move (often for work). They thought they would keep their family home in case they ever moved back to the area. Yet by keeping it, it couldn’t remain empty (there was still a mortgage to pay on it), so they ended up renting their home out.

 

And that was the start of many Tunbridge Wells buy-to-let landlord's journeys!

 

Many of you landlords reading this have had your fair share of problems, from tenants doing a midnight flit, rent arrears and troublesome tenants, yet also had your rewards. 

 

The average Tunbridge Wells landlord in the last ten years has

seen their investment rise by an average of £218,700

and has earned in rent (before costs) £117,712.

 

Many of you reading this have started to learn about investing and creating a property portfolio by buying additional homes to rent. The average Tunbridge Wells buy-to-let landlord now owns 3.38 properties that generate an impressive passive monthly income with the bonus of growing their household net-worth through growth in the value of their buy-to-let portfolio.

 

With the average buy-to-let landlord in the 56-to-58-year age range, one thing I learned about savvy buy-to-let investing, the shrewd landlords tend to want longer-term mortgages.

 

Taking longer-term mortgages reduces the risk to the landlord.

 

It sounds counterintuitive, yet it comes down to leverage. Let me explain that whilst leverage is formidable in buy-to-let, it is also quite risky.

 

Before I explain why some readers might not know what leverage is and how it relates to mortgages and buy-to-let, two-thirds of landlords are debt-free, yet those landlords who have come into the property investment games in the last 10 or 20 years have had to use borrowed money (mortgages) to finance their deals. Therefore, by putting down a small amount of say 20% and borrowing the other 80%, if you calculated your return on an investment base only the money that you put into the deal, then that is what is called leverage (i.e. using borrowed money as a funding source when investing in property and generate greater returns on borrowed money).

You would think, as, say a typical 55-year-old Tunbridge Wells landlord, you would want to be only taking a mortgage out for however long you intend to work (say ten years at most) – meaning your portfolio would be all bought and paid for by the time you retire. Yet the clever buy-to-let landlords I talk to don’t see their portfolio as having to be paid off (and mortgage-free) by the time they retire. They have understood how to utilise and administer their mortgage debt rationally to enhance their returns without taking on unwarranted risk.

 

By taking a short-term mortgage of say ten years, compared to a 25-year mortgage, during those ten years, your monthly mortgage payments will be particularly high (because the longer the mortgage term, the smaller the monthly payments will be).

 

Also, you can pay off a 25-year mortgage in 10 years, but you cannot pay off a 10-year mortgage in 25 years.

 

Longer mortgage terms mean lower monthly mortgage payments, which in turn means greater cash flow and more elasticity within your rental portfolio. Now to some landlords, possessing their rental properties debt-free is very important. Yet, I would still seriously consider taking the 25-year buy-to-let mortgage and make additional payments every month to help you to pay the mortgage off early …

 

Therefore, if for example, you have a bad couple of months without any rent coming in or unexpected bills, you can return to making the mandatory lower monthly mortgage payments without getting your property repossessed.

 

So, by taking on the longer-term mortgage, you decrease your risk because it has the lower required payments.

 

Let me give you an example - if our landlord wanted to buy a terraced house property for say £438,100 and put down a 25% deposit of £109,525, the best buy-to-let deal I found online on the day of writing this article was a 1.79% Santander 5-year fixed-rate buy-to-let mortgage. 

 

Looking at the mortgage payments per month when comparing the mortgage terms; on the 10-year mortgage, the mortgage payment would be £3,018.92 per month. Therefore, our landlord would have to top up from personal savings to make up the monthly mortgage payments. Whilst if they choose the 25-year mortgage, the mortgage payment would be £1,387.89 per month. This would mean our landlord would be in profit from day one.

 

Some might say though the longer term means more interest payments, as it's 25 years and not 10 years. Yet, at today's low interest rates, that would mean an additional £54,095 in interest payments spread over 15 years – not much in the grand scheme of things.

 

 

	10-year Mortgage	25-year Mortgage
25% Deposit Required	£109,525	£109,525
75% Mortgage Borrowed	£328,575	£328,575
Annual Interest Rate	1.97%	1.97%
Mortgage Length (in years)	10	25
Mortgage Payment per Month	£3,018.92	£1,387.89
Sum of Mortgage Payments	£362,270	£416,366
Interest Cost	£33,695	£87,791

 

Therefore, by taking the longer-term mortgage, as a savvy landlord, you are 'cash flow positive’, meaning you can build a reserve fund for every one of your rental properties to enable you to deal with any unforeseen voids and repairs.

 

The best way to deal with a buy-to-let property is to see it as a small mini-business, and as with all businesses, you need to grow your income and reduce your expenses whilst in the background provide a decent rate of return for your investment.

 

The greater the amount of mortgage debt you carry, the greater your monthly mortgage payments, and the simple fact is, the shorter the mortgage term, the higher the monthly mortgage payments. So, if you take on a sensible level of mortgage debt and be ‘cash flow positive’, you can profit from much better returns without taking on excessive risk.

 

These are my thoughts - please share yours I'd love to hear them.

 

P.S. Before I go, I would like to add this - my comments are only a very brief commentary on the issues raised and should not be relied on as financial advice and that no liability is accepted for such reliance, and that anyone needing such advice should consult a qualified financial adviser or other authorised person.