Every year I watch good buyers lose good houses.
Not because they didn't have the money. Because they made one of two mistakes that come round like clockwork.
Mistake one: shopping before you're ready
Some people call it chicken and egg. It isn't.
If you need to sell to buy, the sequence is simple: house on the market first, viewings of your next place second.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is skipping a step that matters.
Go house-hunting before you've done this and two things happen.
First, you annoy people. Vendors and agents put real effort into a viewing - tidying up, clearing the diary, getting the kids and the dog out of the house – and none of that is fair to ask of them for a buyer who hasn't lifted a finger to become one.
Second, and worse for you, you fall in love with somewhere you're not actually in a position to buy. Then you get to watch someone else – someone who did their prep – take it off the market while you're still waiting for your own sale to catch up.
If you're a first-time buyer, the equivalent groundwork is a mortgage agreement in principle. It costs you an afternoon.
Turn up without one and you're not a serious buyer yet, whatever your intentions.
None of this is about jumping the gun. It's about being able to move the moment the right house appears, rather than starting the process from scratch once you've already found it.
Mistake two: fixating on price instead of value
This one might sound odd coming from an estate agent, but once you can genuinely afford a property, price stops being the important question.
The important question is whether the house does what you need it to do.
Right location. Right size. Right feel, if it's home you're after. Right yield, if it's an investment.
Get that wrong and you'll pay for it many times over in the hassle and cost of moving again.
The asking price versus offer price game causes the most damage here.
I've bought property myself for well under the asking price, because I judged it to be genuinely overpriced.
I've also paid full asking price – including on my own home – because I judged it to be undervalued and knew I was still getting a good deal.
The number on the board tells you what the seller hopes for.
It doesn't tell you what the property is worth to you.
Buyers who fixate on shaving another thousand or two off the price often end up in one of two places: they lose the right house to someone less precious about the last few percent, or worse, they win a negotiation on the wrong house.
A bargain on a property that never suited you isn't a bargain. It's an expensive lesson.
Get proceedable first. Work out what a property is actually worth to you second.
Everything else – the back and forth on price, the timing, the paperwork – falls into place a great deal more easily once those two things are sorted.
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