Property Auctions
Why sell at auction?
This gives our vendors another avenue to promote their property to serious buyers such as property investors and first time buyers who attend auctions
Ideal property/candidates for the Auction include:
Sellers requiring a fast sale and completion.
Properties with common defects: short leases, incomplete titles, structural problems, construction types.
Properties which are difficult to finance such as High Rises and flats above commercial property.
Rented property
If you are interested in listing your property in the forthcoming Auction the following provisos apply: ensure that you would be in a position to exchange contracts with the successful bidder, on the day of the Auction and be in a position to complete / move out up to 28 days later.
Selling rented property at auction
If your property is let the tenant can remain in place until completion, enabling you to receive rent right up until completion. The property can be sold with an ongoing tenancy, making it attractive to a buy-to-let investor.
How it works
To register for the Auction, first we would need to discuss your property with the Auctioneers and suggest a ‘guide price’ to you. The ‘guide price’ is set at a level which attracts the viewers to the property and encourages bids at the Auction.
We would also discuss a ‘reserve price’ with you. The ‘reserve price’ is the lowest price which you authorise the Auctioneers to sell / exchange at. The Auctioneers are bound to achieve the highest price for you and they maintain the bidding to the highest level. They will only ’sell’ if the bid meets or exceeds the ‘reserve price.’
ludlowthompson will organise the viewings on the property prior to the Auction and supply the buyers with the sales particulars in the usual way. You would still have the benefit of negotiators phoning out the property and expansive web advertising through ludlowthompson and various web portal sites.
How to go ahead and list with the Auction
If we agree that your property is suitable for Auction, the next step is to register for the Auction and create an advertisement and ‘lot number’ in the Auction catalogue. The fee for this reservation is just £250.00 plus VAT per auction. This is a non-refundable fee.
There is a No-Sale No-Fee policy at Auction, and the cost will be 2% plus VAT of the eventual sale price of the property, subject to a minimum fee. The fee for selling at Auction becomes due at exchange and payable by Completion.
To find out more or auction property contact:
45 percent lesser sales for London Properties
The growing malaise in the UK housing market is expected to be underlined this week when Savills, the estate agent that specialises in selling upmarket properties, confirms that transactional volumes are down about 45 per cent on this time last year.
In a separate blow to the industry, Foxtons, which is famous for its fleet of branded minis and its feisty sales tactics, is understood to have called in bankers at NM Rothschild to advise the group on restructuring its debt, a year after it was bought by the private equity firm BC Partners.
Savills, which will report its half-year results on Thursday, has already reported a wide-ranging cost-cutting exercise that will involve reductions in its adverting budget and redundancies. A spokesman for the group declined to say how many people are expected to leave the firm, but said that reports in The Observer newspaper that scores would be cut were “gilding a lily”. The group employs 17,000 people worldwide, of whom between 3,500 and 4,000 work in London.
According to reports, the agency’s chief executive, Jeremy Helsby, has told staff at the firm’s 111 UK offices that he sees house prices falling by 25 per cent by the end of next year. He does, however, believe that house prices in London will return to 2007 levels by 2012.
Savills is known as the “posh estate agent” because of its association with the upper end of the market. The spokesman for the firm, however, said top-end residential property represented just 20 per cent of the company’s activity. The 160-year-old company is understood to be benefiting from having an Asian property management business.
Since the onset of the credit crunch, sales of homes worth above £1m are at a practical standstill. As the number of job loses in the City escalates, so those that underpinned the top end of the housing market have been forced to rein in ambitions for ever grander homes.
The group has previously said that house prices have already fallen by 10 per cent in the capital since last year. The spokesman for the group, however, argued that it is the slump in the volume of houses being sold that has led the cost-cutting. The group’s share price closed at 240p last Friday, down nearly 50 per cent in the past 12 months. Analysts at the group’s own brokers at ABN Amro are predicting that the profits will fall significantly for the whole year and that the dividend will be frozen.
Savills, however, is not the only estate agent to be feeling the heat of the economic downturn. Foxtons, the London-focused group that was bought by financial sponsors BC Partners last year, has called in the investment bank NM Rothschild to review the group that will most likely include a restructuring of the agency’s debt.
The company borrowed £390m from Bank of America and Mizuho just before both the capital markets and the housing sector turned last year, leaving the firm facing repayments of £26m a year.
While the group insists that it is not close to breaching any of its banking covenants – conditions measuring turnover in relation to debt laid down by the lenders to ensure that Foxtons does not overstretch itself – it has not replaced 60 staff who left voluntarily in February.
If the group did get into serious trouble, the banks could take ownership of it or ask BC Partners to inject more equity. Both scenarios are unattractive, but if the housing market continues to fall without any sign of improvement, the banks could be forced to act.
It is not just London, however, that is causing the estate agency industry a headache. Last week HBOS said that it was closing 53 offices nationwide that belong to its Halifax chain, with the loss of about 100 jobs. The move comes as part of the bank’s “selective asset disposal” programme, which has become necessary after HBOS saw its profits dip by 70 per cent in the first half of the year.
The average price of a home in the UK was £177,351 last month, down from £199,084 in July 2007.
London House Prices Fall by 5.3%
The almost unthinkable a year ago has now happened with London house prices falling by 5.3% in the last month, according to the figures.
Like many other parts of the country, the capital has even found itself falling into ‘negative equity’ territory for asking prices year-on-year.
Meanwhile, it has been predicted that hundreds of thousands of people could lose their jobs over the next two to three years and that unemployment levels may top two million.
After months where asking prices moved down by much less than the actual prices agreed on property deals, householders slashed the asking price of the average British home by 2.3 per cent last month – a drop of £5,403. In London, the discounting has become even more marked, with asking prices down by 5.3 per cent last month alone, representing a reduction of £21,000 in the four weeks to 9 August, said Rightmove in its latest survey of the housing market.
Indians Rescue London’s Property Bubble British Land Projects Delayed
Britain’s property agents are now targeting an estimated 1.25-lakh Indian dollar millionaires, who are expected to invest nearly $30 billion ( Rs. 1.2 lakh crore) over the next decade in London properties. Enquiries have come in for luxury homes worth more than 500,000 pounds in some cases — that is more than Rs. 4 crore each.
Some agents like Berkley Homes are flying in senior executives to make direct contacts with would-be buyers in India to woo them to London, particularly to addresses like Knightsbridge and Kensington or places like Hampstead and St. John’s Wood, which have an abundance of Indians.
British Land is delaying starting building the “Cheesegrater” tower in the City of London in the hope of launching the skyscraper in time for the peak of the next commercial property cycle.
The UK’s second biggest property company expects the building will be completed by 2012, a year later than originally planned, but is reluctant to commit itself to a firm date. It also hopes to negotiate a cheaper construction contract for the building, despite recent evidence that building material prices have soared by 12 per cent this year and are forecast to continue to climb
London Property Prices Fall
Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) — U.K. house prices declined the most in at least a quarter century in July as banks starved the housing market of credit and pessimism about the economy increased, an HBOS Plc report showed.
The average cost of a home fell 8.8 percent to 177,351 pounds ($345,825) from a year earlier, the steepest drop since the survey began in 1983, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender said in a statement today. Prices fell 1.7 percent from June.
The worst housing-market slump in more than two decades is deepening as rising fuel, food and credit costs erode living standards, raising the prospect of the first U.K. recession since 1991. Bank of England policy makers will probably keep the benchmark interest rate at 5 percent today as they try to tame the fastest inflation in 11 years.
“Pressure on householders’ income, together with a very significant reduction in mortgage finance due to the global financial markets crisis, is constraining potential house buyers’ ability to enter the market,” Suren Thiru, an economist at HBOS, said in the statement. “This is resulting in both lower prices and activity levels.”
Home values last month fell to the level they were at in June 2006, HBOS said.
Banks have curtailed credit as the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage market pushed writedowns and credit losses above $493 billion. U.K. lenders approved 36,000 loans for house purchase in June, the least since comparable data began nine years ago.
Falling Confidence
U.K. consumer confidence fell the most in at least four years in July as property values fell, unemployment rose and living costs soared, Nationwide Building Society said yesterday. The British economy grew 0.1 percent in the quarter through July, the slowest pace in three years, the National Institute of Economic & Social Research said.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is considering ways to revive the market for residential property to shore up his dwindling popularity. A survey by BPIX Ltd. showed 47 percent of respondents backing the Conservative opposition compared with 24 percent for the ruling Labour Party. BPIX surveyed 2,194 adults from July 31 to Aug. 2.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, in an Aug. 5 interview on BBC Radio 4, left open the possibility of a temporary suspension of a tax on house sales to boost the housing market. The government charges homebuyers a levy of between 1 percent and 4 percent, depending on the value.
Squeeze on Incomes
Britons’ incomes are getting squeezed by the fastest price gains since at least 1997. Consumer-price inflation reached 3.8 percent in June, almost double the government 2 percent target, as oil and food costs soared.
Faster inflation has sharpened the dilemma facing central bank policy makers as the economy slows to a crawl. U.K. services from banks to airlines contracted in July, according to a survey of about 700 companies, and factory production unexpectedly dropped for a fourth month in June, reports on Aug. 5 showed.
