So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

We completed early this morning so this will be my final post. I have enjoyed it (for the most part) and thanks for all your comments and support. Will I do it again – possibly. Will I blog it – probably not.

This blog will now sit in the ether for the rest of eternity or at least until Google decide to pull the plug or start charging.

I may pop back occasionally to see how many people are reading a non updated blog. I may even blog about it!!!!

Lessons and Reflections

With a bit of luck this will be my penultimate post. I am told that failure to complete after exchange is almost unheard of (one agent I spoke to said it had never happened in her career) and so by this Friday I will have nothing left to blog about. If it does fall through I shall keep the 10% deposit so it won't be all bad news!

This gives me a good opportunity for reflection.

Lessons learned

• Buy for as little as possible and sell for as much as possible. Obvious really but had we not had the foresight to re-negotiate the purchase price early on we would have lost money or broken even at best.

• Ensure that the refurbishment is to a high standard. We did do this but even so surveyors, perhaps because of the current climate, are being incredibly fussy and are marking down valuations. This makes borrowing harder. We had to reduce the agreed price by £1500 over a tiny problem picked up by surveyors that would not have mattered in 2007.

• If your purchasers want a full structural survey be pleased provided you have nothing to hide. Our first abortive purchaser pulled out because his survey (a cheap one) had so many "may be" and "could be" type statements followed by the advice "we recommend a full survey" that the buyer got spooked. A full survey is a good thing.

• Takes loads of pictures all the way through the process and be prepared to show then if required. The photographic evidence of the steel straps proved useful as the purchaser's surveyor wanted to see evidence of what we had done to the wall. This would have been difficult if we had just plastered it over.

• Get guarantees, warranties and certificates for everything and keep them. The solicitors will want them and you will struggle to sell without them. In our case this included, gas, electricity, damp, timber, windows and building control.

• There are several ups and downs in the process. Don't let you highs be too high or your lows be too low. I suffered from both these extremes.

• Make sure you can afford to do it and you are comfortable with the level of borrowing you will have if you house is unsold / unlet for several months. I passed on the first criteria but I became (strictly have become as we haven't completed) uncomfortable about the level of debt.

• Try and ensure your property is of interest to as many possible purchasers as possible. Quirky is not necessarily good. We feel into this trap. It is beautiful house however the height of the stairs means that for many who viewed they could not buy however much they loved the refurbishment. Also make sure that the property is right for the area. In hindsight a detached cottage is not necessarily what people wanted as it is a unique property in the area. Unique isn't always good.

• Get proper insurance for a refurbishment project. It is more expensive but it is crazy to do it on the cheap.

I am sure there is much, much more I should be writing for posterity but that will do for now.

One Year On

One of the benefits (or perhaps a curse) of blogging this story is that you actually do get a chance to read what you were thinking during the process. It prevents selective memory. My first post on this blog was one year ago tomorrow so today marks my first year as a blogger. I don't suppose I will be writing a similar post to celebrate two years but you never know.

It was the middle of August 2008 that we first saw the property that was going to take up so much of our time for the next twelve months.

To celebrate a year of blogging here are some pointless statistics.

• In twelve months this blog has been visited 2,537 times.

• There have been 374 unique visitors.

• People from 35 countries have been on the site with the UK followed by USA, Ireland and Brazil sending the most visitors.

• The most popular time to visit is 7:00PM at night with only three people making the effort at 3:00AM in the morning.

• Internet explorer is the most popular browser @ 64%. 3 people use Opera and 12 Chrome – oh yes and 4 people browsed the site from an iPhone.

That's enough analysis. Google Analytics has a lot to answer for.

Some further thoughts

What a long and drawn and process this has been. I had no idea that it would take quite so long from completing the refurbishment on the house through to exchange and completion.

The main problem appears to be that after you have accepted a quote, buyers (often through no fault of their own) are taking ages getting everything in order and there seems to be little you can do to speed the process up. In the case of our buyer their mortgage offer (which had been agreed in principle before we accepted) took weeks to come through. In the meantime the buyers had two surveys done, one of which took a long time to carry out and even longer to report on.

In retrospect the whole thing when through smoothly, just very slowly. This leaves plenty of time for worry and fret as you know that if a buyer pulls out you will have to wait another two or three months from getting another offer to getting to exchange again. All in all the house was not actually available for anybody else to buy for much of the last 6 months, it has just been under offer waiting for paperwork and due process.

Initial calculations look like we will end up making just under 13% return on capital in just under 12 months but this reduces to 8% if I take a very prudent account of financing costs. I will need to do some work to find out how much of the finance costs (bearing in mind I borrowed against my main home) I will be able to claim against the cost of the refurbishment for CGT purposes. I can see an accountant getting a slice of the profits!

Never mind, if I have to pay CGT it won't be until January 2011.

A brief update

I know I promised an update but I have drunk too much wine to type anything of any use.

As I cycled home tonight I was thinking about how long this whole process has taken. I looked back in the blog archives and re-read my first post. http://amateurpropertydeveloper.blogspot.com/2008/09/starting-out.html

So – we will complete on this project exactly one week and one year after we started out. Was it worth it?

I will do the sums and calculations in a couple of days but we did make a decent profit after everything has been taken into account but was it worth the stress and worry?

We Have Exchanged

More details to follow ......

Under Offer Again

Let's hope for a smoother passage this time than last.

Fingers crossed.