One of the most frustrating and emotive things about moving house is that both buyer and seller can pull out of the deal at any time. There are normally perfectly reasonable explanations, but the retraction can cause a huge amount of distress to the other party, not to mention the incurred costs.

The legal process of selling and buying property

The legal process of transferring property from one owner to another in England is, let’s face it, protracted and fragile, and agreements are not binding until contracts are exchanged. Of course there are many and varied reasons why property transactions fail to complete, but the point is that it can take weeks, if not months, of anguish and stress before there is total commitment to the transaction. So why can’t there be certainty from, or soon after acceptance of the offer? It would make the whole house moving process so much more straightforward and would certainly help to ease our stress levels.

In Scotland the whole process is very different, where pre-offer investigations into a property are the norm, so that when the offer is accepted it is binding. This, however, means that buyers spend out a fair amount before certainty and because the bidding is normally blind they have no idea whether they will be successful or not.

Pre-contract deposits when selling property

What about a pre-contract deposit? Sadly, any Solicitor will tell you that they are not worth the salt and have to be refundable since they cannot be unconditional.

The Government did attempt to speed up the conveyancing process with the Home Information Pack, which in itself was not a bad idea, but its implementation was flawed as it emerged that buyers did not trust the vendor-commissioned surveys and their solicitors did not trust the local searches. It also reined back a free flow of stock to the market due to the up-front costs.

What is the answer, therefore? Whatever it is it won’t be simple and certainly won’t be decisive. A middle ground is to ensure that the possibility of the parties pulling out are minimised through speed of transaction. Transparency about a property is key to this. Making pre-offer information available via the Agents should be strongly encouraged, as should perhaps a scheme for buyers’ contributions to vendor-commissioned surveys, not only acting as a form of deposit, but also freeing the surveyor to act in an unbiased fashion for all parties who contribute. Maybe RICS should be considering this? The Government could also invest in more Council staff and technology to cut the waiting time for searches from several weeks to several days, rather than concentrating on purchase- assistance schemes (controversial!).

Put simply, a pre-offer preparation of the survey and draft contract, combined with speedy local search results could and should cut the whole process to 10 working days. The likelihood of either party withdrawing would then be cut dramatically and a fast exchange of contracts would provide certainty. We can dream, but surely it can’t be that hard!

Ask any estate agent about the current state of the housing market and you are likely to be greeted with a scowl!  At the start of this year, agents (and their vendor clients), hoped for signs of the long awaited recovery and although there have been one or two encouraging economic indicators, the reality is that the market is only just starting to get fully get underway.

So why have things been so sluggish? The answer lies partly in the continuing financial recession and lack of available mortgage funding but there is also something else that has had an impact and that is the weather. Blaming the weather might sound like a weak excuse but I am convinced that it does have a bearing on both buyer and seller behaviour.

When the weather is cold, wet or even snowy, it is human nature to adopt a ‘hunker down and stay in’ mentality. The opposite however is also true. Sunshine is the perfect antidote, particularly with a touch of warmth, when we all feel that much more positive and walk with a spring in our step.

After the long and miserable winter, we started to see a pick-up in viewings and new properties being put on to the market at the end of February and beginning of March with many agents thinking; ‘Great, here we go’, only for the recent protracted cold snap leading to everything going back into hibernation again. The same thing happened during the wet spell last summer.

After the delayed start to spring, gardens are at long last coming to life making them more photo friendly and we expect the improved weather will lead to more houses being put on to the market. A wider choice will encourage more buyers to search for a new home and with many of those extra buyers being prospective sellers as well, it should end up being a self-perpetuating exercise.

Although sadly we cannot control the weather, there are things that sellers can do to make their homes more attractive at this time of year. The proverbial ‘spring clean’ is a great start as is a thorough de-clutter and whilst buyers do not necessary expect to see a show house, it should appear smart and tidy. Good lighting, flowers and a touch of room fragrance all help whilst in the garden, lawns need to be mowed and instant colour can be provided by tubs of spring bulbs.

For a house to stand out, particularly as it is almost certainly going to be first seen on the internet, good photography is absolutely essential. Pick an agent that uses professional photography as a matter of course and one that ensures that winter shots are replaced by more flattering spring/early summer pictures.

There is a market out there and with a touch of warm sunshine, we should see it blossom again!

At some stage in our lives we will all move house and the complexities of the process will either glide smoothly to a happy conclusion, or cause stress and anxiety. The single main cause of any stressful move comes when a chain is involved: a who is moving to b, who is moving to c and so on. Because of the number of simultaneous transactions involved, the finances to arrange, the surveys to satisfy, the glitches in title, covenant or contract and the completion dates that need to tie in, there is the much greater chance that the whole pile will collapse and all parties will have to start again.

In any market avoiding a chain is the ideal. The simplest transaction of willing buyer and willing seller is just what the doctor ordered, but the seller will always need a property to move to and the buyer will often rely on a property to sell.

Which brings us to the chicken and the egg. Which comes first? If you are considering a move, do you wait for your perfect house to become available to buy before selling yours, or do you put yours on the market first in the hope that the perfect house will become available. In both cases you will have to rely on a great deal of luck to tie in both the sale and the purchase in the same time period and, of course, the dreaded chain is always lurking to scupper the whole deal.

In any market conditions this is always a quandary. Now especially, however, it is more so. It is not an easy market to see sales through, moving house is expensive so people want to get it right and there is still a big unknown in the larger picture.

There has been a general lack of quality property available, so the chances of your tying in an immediate onward purchase is slim. The reasons for the lack of supply are plenty, but the main one is that folks are holding back from putting their properties on the market until they see one that they want to move to – and so the catch 22 is born. If properties aren’t coming to the market, they won’t be seen as available and their potential buyers won’t put their properties on the market either. This isn’t a new climate, it has been going on for a long time and it has always restricted movement.

So what is the answer? If you are a truly motivate seller, put your house on the market before finding your next home and be prepared to break the chain by renting for the short term. This will free you from the stress of a fragile chain and put you in a perfect position to jump as soon as your perfect house becomes available to buy. Yes, it means a double move, yes it means an unsettled period, yes it means paying out in rent what you could be saving, but put these against a successful outcome, far less trauma and the significant extra costs of collapsing chains and you can start to see the reasoning. Some attempts at moving house go on for months or even years and chains are frequently to blame, while those who decide to break have already moved on and put the stress well and truly behind them.

The forecast for the 2013 UK housing market is that it will not be much different to 2012 in terms of property transaction levels and most commentators agree that that it is unlikely that we will see house prices recovering this coming year. Low interest rates are supporting a fragile market and while they remain low, prices will be hold up to some extent, but it certainly won’t be a bumper twelve months and indeed sellers will have to take a pragmatic approach in order to attract buyers.

Despite the gloom of low growth and increasing austerity, there is however, resilience in the local housing market and if you are considering a move this year it is wise to take heed of some sensible advice.

1. If you live in a good, uncompromised location, be happy because your property should sell. If it does not then there it is probably because something is wrong with either the price or the marketing strategy.
2. If your house is for instance affected by a busy road, overlooked by a close neighbour or has too small a garden, be realistic about the price.
3. Have a few agents out to appraise your property and don’t necessarily go with the highest estimated value.
4. Selling houses in this market is all about effort, so be prepared to put effort in yourself and choose an agent who you believe will give it everything.
5. Trust your agent. Most experienced ones have been have been through good times and bad, so understand the present conditions. Someone offering a truly personal service will guide you through the mire to achieve the best possible price for you.
6. It is never too early in the year to get going and putting your ducks in a row now can mean you hit the road running when you are ready to do so, so consider taking advice sooner rather than later.

Taking note of these points will provide you with the best chance of a strong and successful sale campaign, so good luck if you are going to take the plunge in 2013 and Happy New Year!

Having worked in residential estate agency for some 24 years and in rural agency before that, I have seen a few ups and downs in the property market. The current recession is however the deepest and longest that I have experienced and the widely held view is that it will be some time before we see another property boom. The likelihood is that when the market does recover, and no one can be sure when this will be, it will be a long, slow process.

Here in South Wiltshire and North Dorset we are perhaps fortunate in that the right property, sensibly priced and promoted, still continues to attract good buyers.

With the property market in the doldrums one would have expected a few estate agencies to have gone out of business but this has not been the case. This goes to show that the vast majority of buyers and sellers still prefer to use an agent for their valuation, marketing, negotiation and sales processing expertise as well as having someone to act as an intermediary.

A good agent, as well as finding buyers for their vendor clients’ homes, can have an instrumental role to play once a sale has been agreed. It is after all not just about striking a deal but seeing it through to a conclusion; something that at times can be a fraught business that needs to be handled with tact, diplomacy and patience.

So is my job the same as it was back in 1988? There has been new Legislation to contend with such as the Property Misdescriptions Act, the implementation and then cancelation of the Home Information Pack, the introduction of the Energy Performance Certificate and various Regulations but it is still basically the same role, i.e. the marketing and selling of property. What has certainly changed is the way this is done.

As a young land agent, I was surprised that the estate agents in the office that I worked in at the time, would regularly spend two hours in the pub at lunchtime, coming back worse for wear, wreaking of beer and smoke but in those days that was how a good deal of business was carried out. Fortunately the working environment now is very much more sober, slicker and professional.

The quality of agents’ marketing material over the years has improved vastly. When I started out sales particulars consisted of very basic, poorly photocopied information sheets which if you were lucky had a stuck-on mini photograph on the front. Sales details are now much smarter, more relevant and image rather than word led with the better quality agents using floor plans, site plans, maps and plenty of professionally taken photographs.

Perhaps the most radical change during my career has been the irresistible advancement of the computer. With faster technology and ever improving software programmes, managing the marketing and sales process has become very much more efficient, speedier and effective whilst the extraordinary reach of the internet has revolutionised how buyers search for their next home leading to the requirement for an estate agent to have a traditional high street office becoming a thing of the past.

A good illustration of this is that Rural View recently took over the marketing of a house in the Nadder Valley from a well-known national agent that has a city centre office whereas we do not. In the five months that the original agency marketed the property they arranged six viewings, in the three weeks Rural View have been promoting it we have so far had fourteen