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It is actually harder to trade up in the "down market" here...the banks are watching the media too.  They see 'house prices fall...property market slow' etc etc.  They are now including conditions in mortgage documents requiring the customer to have Sale Agreed on their own home before they will allow drawdown of the mortgage for their new home.  This then either creates a long chain of people waiting on the purchasers of their home to sell their respective home or vendors refusing to sell to you until they receive a letter from YOUR bank telling them that YOU have been sanctioned for a mortgage and bridging!

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Oscar Wilde
by Sam on Mon Mar 26th, 2007 at 08:58:27 AM EST
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Ah, I now know what "no chain" means.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Mon Mar 26th, 2007 at 09:02:51 AM EST
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saw this in the UK in the early 90s.  Happens here too but to a lesser extent.  From what I've seen in the US, people sell then either rent back or use a longish closing (90-120 days) to find the new home with a virtually done deal on their sale side in hand (contingencies cleared etc).  It's always tricky trying to get a chain set up as most people don't have enough capital to own 2 houses at once.  Contingent sales are always a pain in the ass for all concerned.  Even worse in places like the UK where the paperwork is much more cumbersome.

But my point wasn't that trading up isn't tricky, but rather price cutting tends to be proportional to price so you want to move up in price when the market is weak.

by HiD on Mon Mar 26th, 2007 at 09:31:17 PM EST
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You're pretty much right on price, though getting caught in the stamp duty thing is making it worse than it should be for us.
by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Tue Mar 27th, 2007 at 03:18:00 AM EST
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we don't have that sort of fee in the US in most jurisdictions.  I remember it pissing me off when we bought a house in the UK.   But you got to pay somewhere/somehow and I could hardly cry poverty at the time.

Still transaction costs are ugly.  We often pay far higher real estate commissions (5-6%) + loan fees, title insurance etc such that between buyer and seller as much as 10% extra is spent.

100% agree that step changes are stupid as someone said in this thread.

by HiD on Tue Mar 27th, 2007 at 03:47:01 AM EST
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we don't have that sort of fee in the US in most jurisdictions

Makes sense. After all, was not stamp tax one of those reasons cited for breaking away from Britain in the first place?

Sure, there was some other stuff to.

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

And being ruled by a madman named George was apparently not very popular either.

But you can not have everything, now can you?

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Tue Mar 27th, 2007 at 09:11:24 PM EST
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