UFO Info Week-End

Selling this type of property he says is a matter of waiting patiently for

Selling this type of property, he says, is a matter of waiting patiently for the rare purchaser who shares the vendor’s taste and ideas.Julian Prout spent six years and £50,000 turning four stone walls of a ruined mill that had cost £20,000 into a four-bedroom house. After two years on the market at £195,000, Penford Mill is still unsold. The price has been reduced to £175,000.Buyers with a DIY bent are advised to resist paying too much for raw materials. If they are converting for resale their investment including building costs has to add up to realistic resale price. And local authorities are not always amenable to change of use on commercial buildings.

The schemes that stand the most chance of success are those that celebrate a building’s intrinsic architectural qualities. Uncompromised spaces and notionally demountable fittings will find favour with planning officials and future buyers.NEW HOMESThe house-building industry is not exactly firing on all cylinders but over the last year it has at least managed to corner a larger share of the overall market. Prices remain stable, at a nationwide average of £67,866, and as the trickle of early spring buyers begins to look more like a small crowd, housebuilders predict an even bigger increase in turnover this year.The Housebuilders Federation puts it down to “an irresistible continuation of choice and value for money”. What that means in essence is that developers have a lot of unsold plots to shift and in order to maintain half-decent sales figures they are bargaining, doing deals and trading in – effectively undercutting the second-hand housing market in the process.Among a range of temptations, builders are throwing in the cost of everything from stamp duty, mortgage redundancy insurance, surveys and legal fees, to removals, carpets and appliances. Some are offering discount mortgages and “gifted deposits” (ie, a discount) to first-time buyers. Others are turning trapped vendors into buyers by taking hard-to-sell properties off their hands in exchange for brand new ones.As well as the value for money they may offer, new homes are perceived as being a secure, low-maintenance, energy-efficient product protected by a warranty.

A competitive market has helped to improve general standards of construction. And as long as you are not expecting 21st-century innovation, houses are also looking a lot better lately.Connie Vitto of the housebuilders Ideal Homes describes the latest in housing style as a design revolution “Nobody is building boxes any more,” she says. ‘The industry is much more sensitive to kerb appeal.”Translated into brick and block, that means cosy groups of mock Victorian- Edwardian houses that are arranged around duckponds and olde England village greens. Housing fashions come and go like any others, and the in things at the moment are barge-boards, cottagey porches, sweeping gables, bay windows, pantiles, and fiddly bits of flint and decorative brickwork.The contemporary garden suburb tends to come in a small, neatly landscaped package like Ideal Homes’ Wynyard Village in Cleveland (prices from £85,000) where 160 homes are planned within a five-year timescale. But the confident Eighties-style mega-development is still around. At Great Notley Garden Village in Braintree, Essex (prices from £112,500), Countryside Properties plan to build 2,000 houses – albeit in prettily clustered hamlets.At Abbey Meads, in Swindon, the first of a series of three urban villages is putting down roots in the town’s Northern Development Area.

And here there are plans to build 10,000 homes within the next 15 years, making the £650 million project the largest private housing scheme in Europe. Bristol’s Bradley Stoke, which originally planned for 8,500 houses, made the same grandiose claim back in 1986. It was cut short by the recession, and what there is of the development is now known locally as Sadly Broke.”A lot of lessons were learnt from Bradley Stoke,” says Mike Elliott of Prowtings, one of the dominant players in a consortium of builders. Abbey Meads and its sister villages will develop “in line with demand”.AUCTIONSThe residential property auction is one corner of the market that has grown fatter and fitter during the recession. In the last few years, a steady supply of repossessions by banks and building societies has doubled the volume of lots that are brought to auction. Last year alone, properties worth around £800 million were offered by the nation’s auctioneers.

The figures encompass the whole gambit of auction fodder, including commercial properties and unusual items that are hard to value, but repossessed homes continue to underpin the recent boom in saleroom activity.Auction houses have made a determined effort to lure the ordinary purchaser – also known as the “end-user” – into the saleroom. How-to-buy guides, auctions-in-action videos, reassuring seminars and mortgage advice are among a variety of services that are designed to demystify the process.The auction is being sold as a decisive, no-nonsense, gazumping-free method of buying properties with guaranteed vacant possession, and as a result an unprecedented number of first-time buyers have tried their hand at the auction game. As one auctioneer put it: “You see a lot more prams in the saleroom these days.”Buyers have to produce evidence that they are able to raise the money and are advised to survey the property in advance. There is, therefore, the risk of losing the cost of the survey to a higher bidder or of getting carried away by the heat of the moment. While most buyers enter the fray in the hope of coming away with a cheap property, genuine bargains are rare.At Barnard Marcus’s London sale in March, four private buyers bid against each other for a one-bedroom flat in Clapham, south London. Sold at £45,000, the property achieved £9,0000 above the guide price. And at a recent auction held by the agents Allsop & Co, one young couple bid £271,000 (£20,000 more than the guide price) for a repossessed three-bedroom, two-bathroom flat in a mansion block in Cheyne Walk in Chelsea.Buyers should be aware, says Chris Glen at Barnard Marcus, that the majority of repossessed properties have failed to find a buyer elsewhere, and often present a multitude of structural or legal problems.As the supply of repossessions falls away (dropping by around 30 per cent last year), auction houses are hoping to regain a foothold in pre- recession staples such as commercial and investment properties.But could they not generate new business by persuading more private vendors to sell at auction? After all, as a rapid, clear-cut method of selling, it should be as attractive to vendors as it is to buyers – particularly in a depressed market.