Gauzumping in Scotland – How Does It Affect Property Buyers and Property Sellers in Scotland? In Particular, How Do the Little-Known Law Society Anti-Gazumping Guidelines Affect Property Sellers in Scotland?

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The ‘G’ word is one of the dirtiest words related to property sales.  It blights the reputation of estate agents, puts fear into the hearts of property buyers and causes a whole heap of additional headaches to solicitors north of Hadrian’s Wall.

This article will address some fundamental misunderstandings that exist amongst the majority of property buyers and sellers in Scotland.  It will show you how gazumping actually happens, what you can do as a property buyer to try and prevent it, and how all of this can negatively affect you as a property seller who just wants to get the best possible price for your property.

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We’re Back in Action!!

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I stopped posting on this blog a few months ago as it became overwhelmed with spam comments and, frankly, I didn’t have the time to be manually approving or rejecting 500 comments per day. Meantime we’ve changed the website name (it used to be my personal blog, but pretty much all I was writing about was property anyway!), switched off comments for the time being and it’s time to start commenting regularly on property-related matters again. So welcome back!

Why December is a Great Time to Buy a Property (and Why the Snow Might be Your Secret Weapon to Picking Up a Bargain!)

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If you look at any major property website at the moment, it is clear that there are a lot of adverts for properties with reduced prices or prices well below Home Report valuation. December is usually a great time to be buying a property. However, this year property buyers have another tool up their sleeve to help them pick up a bargain: the snow!

As the winter holidays draw closer, some property sellers start to panic. Most solicitor firms will close for the Christmas and New Year holidays, a period of two full weeks. This means that property buyers can’t even submit an offer during this time, a genuine concern for property sellers. Many sellers also believe that the property market only starts moving in early spring. This isn’t really true but this perception persists.

At this time of year therefore, many property sellers will feel that they have a choice of accepting your offer now or of waiting several weeks until another offer comes along.  This worry might persuade some sellers to accept a lower offer than they otherwise were looking for.

However, this December we can add another factor that further tips the balance of power in favour of property buyers: the snow! If property sellers perceive that December is usually a quiet month, the fact that nobody can physically get to their properties certainly won’t help to ease their worries.

December is definitely a good time to be getting an offer in on a property. Timing and hard bargaining are always useful tools for picking up a great buy.  However this year it might be that a warm coat, snow boots and a 4×4 are the real key to picking up a property bargain!

Monthly Scottish Property Market Update – December 2010

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Ho Ho Ho, Welcome to the Christmas Property Market Update!

‘Tis the season to be jolly, tralalalala la la la la.  ‘Tis also the season to look back at the housing market in the year gone by and to make some predictions as to what might happen in the year to come.  That, admittedly, is less exciting and less traditional than being jolly.  But I’m an estate agent, not Santa, so it’s hopefully not entirely unexpected and I’ll do what I can to keep this Update more ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and less ‘Scrooged’.  Double dip recession and housing market crash…bah humbug to the idea!

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Monthly Scottish Property Market Update – November 2010

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November’s Good News…Housing Market Stabilises!

After getting a healthy dose of pessimism thrust at you in my October property market update, I am delighted to report in October that the property market in Scotland appears to be a bit healthier.  That is not just my anecdotal experience but also based on fact.  Well, on statistics from Lloyds TBS actually.  One has to be very careful indeed with using the Halifax, Nationwide etc house prices indexes when making sweeping judgments about the housing market (only part of the market, some are based only on mortgage offers which then may be withdrawn, include remortgages etc etc) but the Press in general doesn’t seem to care much for such caution.  So, on the back of headlines in October like, “3.4% slide in Scots house prices is the worst in UK, say analysts” (Scotsman), this month we had the welcome headline of “Scottish Housing Market Stabilises” (Lloyds TSB Press Release, widely reported).

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Selling Property in Scotland – Top 10 Insider Money Saving Secrets by a Scottish Estate Agent

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I’m the Managing Director and a solicitor at a rapidly-expanding firm of solicitors and estate agents with its Head Office in Edinburgh. We sell properties in Edinburgh and the Lothians, Glasgow and the Scottish Borders and have an innovative feeing model that puts the focus on transparency and value for money. I’ve long thought that the way that most estate agents charge their clients is completely unfair and that it does not represent good value for money.

So, do you want to get back at these greedy estate agents and save yourself thousands of pounds? Well, at the risk of making myself very unpopular with some colleagues, here are my Top 10 Insider Money Saving Secrets about how estate agents make money, hide fees and basically charge you more than you really should be paying.

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Is the Scottish Property Market Tightening Its Belt?

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There are signs, just an inkling of a feeling, that confidence is dropping in the property market.

Not from buyers. We have sold more this month already than last month. The more concerning factor is that supply seems to be weakening. Statistics that I saw today suggest that the number of properties coming to the market in September was lower than the number in August and by a full 10 percent. Our own experience almost exactly mirrors this. More concerning from our point of view is that so far in October we have seen the number take a small nosedive. Our stats are usually pretty representative of what’s happening in the wider market at least in Edinburgh and the Lothians.

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