HOW TO AVOID BEING STUNG IN A HOUSE PURCHASE

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It’s arguable to say that a household purchase is perhaps the most vulnerable you’ll be from a financial perspective.

Sure, there are other potential issues with poor outcomes to avoid, like buying a bad car, or remortgaging your house to fund a failing business.

However, nothing can cloud the judgement quite like being between places. Perhaps you have a buyer biting at your heels for your own property and for you to move on, and you don’t want to waste the opportunity, or you have a job lined up in a new region and feel obligated to buy the first thing that fits.

With all that in mind, t’s easy to make a poor decision or not think it through before moving ahead with a purchase. You’d think that the endless steps between liking and buying a property would temper that flame a little, but not always.

As such, it’s always important to try and avoid being stung in a home purchase. In this guide, we hope to explain how this happens most often, and to help you avoid it.

Make Sure To Use Conveyancing Experts

The legal side of buying a house is always complicated, there's no getting around that. Most people have never dealt with property law before and won't fully understand what they're signing or what might be lurking in the small print.

Having someone who does this for a living and can point any any issues will ensure there's a hugely reduced chance of missing something important, like an old dispute over a boundary or some restriction on what can be done with the land.

They cost money, sure, but finding out six months after moving in about a problem you could have caught earlier generally costs a whole lot more.

A trustworthy conveyancing does many things, but they generally clean and polish the process at every stage. Think of them like the sweeper in the game of curling who chases the curling rock/stone at the Olympics. 

Let The Timeline Panic You

Once an offer gets accepted, you may feel everything needs to happen right now or the whole deal falls apart.

Sellers want to move quickly, agents are chasing their commission, and you might have your own reasons for wanting to be done with it all.

The trouble is, rushing through the process almost always means something will be missed or glossed over because nobody wants to slow down and risk losing the deal.

Taking an extra few weeks to get proper surveys done or ask questions about something that seems off isn't going to ruin anything, but buying a place with hidden problems definitely will. If someone's pushing hard for a faster completion than feels comfortable, you'd be wise to question why.

Pay Attention To Your Gut

Occasionally, a property just doesn't feel right during a viewing. It could be the layout, could be a weird smell nobody's mentioning, or perhaps just something about the seller seeming off.

Feelings like these are worth listening to because they're usually picking up on details before the logical part of your brain has worked out what's wrong.

The same goes for the buying process itself: if answers to questions are vague, if paperwork keeps getting delayed for no clear reason, if stories about the house seem contradictory, then you’re nowhere near entitled for moving on. Remember, you’re never obligated to buy a house.