Our top 10 lessons learned as first time buyers

Hope everyone had a lovely Christmas despite it being so different this year. We spent a lot of time on video calls with family and friends. I hope Christmas will be back to normal next year!

As 2020 draws to a close, I’m taking some time to reflect. Whilst 2020 was definitely a very different year to what I had planned, we also had some great memories! I’m forever grateful that this year gave me time to learn new hobbies, start a blog and settle into our home! 

We managed to purchase our flat in the midst of a global pandemic, order most of our furniture online and spend a lot of time in our new home. I’ve lost count of just how many hours we spent building flat pack furniture! It’s been so fun to turn our flat into a cosy home and to share our learnings and experiences with you all. 

Thank you for joining with me on this journey! I’m still amazed that there are over a thousand followers on the blog’s Instagram account! It means so much to me when I receive messages on how helpful you find the blog. Thank you!

Since the first post in April, the last blog post of 2020 will be my 49th post! My friends were surprised that I’m still writing (so am I!). There’s something satisfying about documenting our journey and sharing our mistakes and learnings with others.  

Here are our top 10 lessons learned as first time buyers:

1. Preparation is key

When we first started looking, we were too excited about viewing properties and hadn’t really thought through in detail about all the steps needed to buy a property.

Naively, we thought our initial preparation of reviewing our finances and getting an agreement in principle was enough because we probably wouldn’t find a property that we liked straight away and could figure out next steps in parallel with property viewings. 

Well, we were wrong. Three weeks into our search, we found a property that we really liked and wanted to make an offer on. We didn’t have a solicitor lined up and well, we were a little clueless which didn’t give the seller much confidence in us.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, so I wrote about the preparation and research needed following our experience in this post!

It was super stressful when we made our first offer. We had a lot of learnings from that experience and I’ve written about it here!

2. Buying a property isn’t always straightforward and in terms of emotions, it’s like a rollercoaster ride.

I can’t tell you all the ups and downs that we experienced because there’s just too many to count.  We went from highs of having an offer accepted and lows of our property purchase falling through and almost losing the entire £3k reservation fee.  Then, after finally finding the next property and having our offer accepted, came the stress of estate agents chasing us. This was followed by anxiety when waiting for completion and the feeling of elation when we finally received the keys to our flat. 

3. It’s not always a quick process.

For some reason, I had thought the home buying process would be straightforward and quick. Maybe it’s because some developers say it’s 28 days to exchange of contracts.  Having been through this twice as an earlier property purchase fell through, this was not the case for us. They both dragged on for months!

However, this is only our experience so others might have a quicker transaction. 

4. Having a good solicitor or conveyancer really makes a difference.

We had a lovely solicitor that we trusted. She was friendly, helpful and great at keeping us updated. There was a quick turnaround from her side, she promptly replied our queries and was always willing to explain terms to help us understand the legal paperwork.

These are the qualities of a solicitor or conveyancer that we found important for a smoother process.

There are a lot of uncontrollable factors when buying a property which can make the process stressful, such as if the seller’s solicitor is slow at responding or issues in the legal paperwork, so we tried to minimise stress from the factors that we could control. For example, applying for the mortgage directly and having a solicitor that we trusted and knew would be helping us chase regularly.

I’ve written a post on the queries that we asked when obtaining quotes and also shared an additional list of our queries for recommended solicitors of new build developments.

5. Having a mortgage broker doesn’t always make things easier.

There are both pros and cons of using a mortgage broker, which I wrote about here based on our experience of using a broker for the previous property that we tried to buy, which later fell through.

If you are applying for a mortgage using a broker, the below posts might be useful for you!

Applying for a mortgage through a broker

Mortgages: using broker or applying directly to a lender

6. Have a list of what to look for at a property viewing.

Given that a property is likely to be the most expensive purchase that we will ever make, it still shocks me how little time we spent looking at a property before making an offer. On average, we only had two viewings of the property before making an offer. This was partly because the estate agent would inform us that the seller had received another offer or because there were not many plots left.

I think we went to over 50 viewings during our property search and so we created our own list of what to look for to make it easier when we went to viewings.

I also wrote about our learnings from our property viewings here!

7. Ask a lot of questions, do research and keep up with property news.

We asked a lot of questions throughout the process because we felt that the more we knew, the more informed our property purchase decision could be.  Also it’s important to know about current issues in the property market, such as cladding. We had no idea about it until it was too late and it caused our flat purchase to fall through. I’ve written about it in this post.

I have a number of posts detailing the various questions we had at different parts of our property buying journey which might be useful for you!

Questions when obtaining quotes from solicitors or conveyancers

Queries we asked mortgage brokers

Questions to ask the estate agent at the property viewing

Questions to ask before making an offer

Questions to ask before making an offer (new builds)

Research that we did on a property before making an offer

Questions we asked when reviewing the report on title

8. Review the contracts carefully as there can be errors.

I was surprised that there were errors in the legal paperwork.  One example that I remember very clearly was spotting that in a version of the contract, the deposit amount was incorrect as it had an extra zero!

I’ve shared some of our queries and checks in this post.  

I still remember the many pages of legal paperwork that we read through and it was so time consuming to have to compare new and old versions side by side. Luckily, later on, we discovered that Google Docs can do this for you! See this post if you want to save yourself some time!

9. New builds aren’t perfect.

I had incorrectly assumed that there would be minimal issues with our new build flat.  

It was disappointing to find a number of issues, especially when buying a property is so expensive and the development was described as high quality in the marketing materials.  It has also been frustrating because the developer has been incredibly slow in dealing with the issues raised, but that is partly due to disruption caused by COVID-19.

Here are our posts on snagging: 

“It’s a new build so there’ll be minimal issues!” I was wrong.

Common snagging issues in new build homes

10. There are a lot of tasks to do after collecting the keys!

When we were close to exchanging and completing on our flat, we entered into lockdown which caused delays and uncertainty so I hadn’t really thought about what we needed to do after we got the keys. Turns out there are quite a few tasks to do so I’ve shared our list on the blog as it might be helpful for others!

That’s all for now! Stay safe and I wish you a wonderful year ahead!

Jess