Have you and your partner had a particularly bad experience buying your first house? Or was your first buy a dream? Did you want to bash your estate agents head against a wall? Or did your move fall through at the last minute? Whatever your story is, I want to hear it!

I am writing a feature for a magazine called X&Y about the difficulty that young couples encounter when trying to get on the property ladder.

I would really appreciate it if you would take the time to tell me what happened to you. You can moan as much as you want!

Thanks guys,

Laura

Do you get paid?? If so, how much do we get ?? :rolleyes:

I'm afraid there will be no payment, sorry

Sadly i'm of no use to you. Our experiennce was as problem free as it could be

Both my purchases have been reasonably problem free. Even so it can still be a very stressful time. Solictors need a kick up the @rse though if you want a fairly quick completion.

The estate agents were terrible when I bought my place. Plus I had problems with a mortgage company, and then a misrepresentation issue with my sellers.

First problem was trying to get the viewing arranged. I rang on a Friday and the agent said they'd get back to me with a time, but by Monday afternoon I'd heard nothing, so I called again. The agent insisted that a viewing had been arranged with me for the Sunday afternoon. I told him I had heard nothing about it, but he was absolutely adamant that someone at their branch had spoken to me personally. He even said he had just left a message asking for my feedback. I said I hadn't received any messages and asked him to check what number he had for me. He then read out a phone number that was completely different to my own. When I asked how someone could have spoken to me when they didn't even have the right phone number down for me, he finally admitted that they had only left a message on this other person's phone, not actually spoken to anyone.

Anyway, I finally got a viewing arranged for the Tuesday night. This is when the agents annoyed me for the second time. I turned up and apologised to the vendors about the confusion over Sunday and explained that it had been a problem at the agents. They then told me that the agents had said I had cancelled the Sunday viewing at the last minute! Thankfully the vendors believed me, but they could have easily held that against me.

Then after the offer was accepted I went to the agents with my ID. I had only made a verbal offer so I asked if they wanted it in writing. The agent then said they already had it in writing. I asked how, because I certainly hadn't put it in writing, and she explained that they had it in writing from taking the offer over the phone!!! So instead I emphasised the usual proviso that the offer was subject to survey. The agent then played ignorant and asked what did I mean. So I explained that if anything major came up on the survey I would either want a renegotiation in price, or I would possibly even withdraw the offer. She then told that this isn't how it works! She spent the next 10 minutes arguing the toss with me over this, at one point effectively telling me that I knew nothing about it as I was a first time buyer and she had sold loads of houses!

After that they were worse than useless. I needed certain basic information about the property for my mortgage application. They refused to give me this information and said it had to go through my solicitor. This delayed the mortgage application for a couple of weeks. Then they would ring me at various stages of the process to give me 'updates' when actually their updates were often weeks out of date, and the calls would end up with me updating them. They even called a few days before completion to tell me we were about to exchange, and I had to tell them that we had exchanged two weeks previously.

As far as the mortgage was concerned, I don't think the first mortgage company were clear about what kind of properties they would consider. They eventually refused to lend on the basis of the property being ex-local authority. However this was despite there being nothng in their literature to say this may be an issue, and only after several weeks and spending several hundred pounds on fees with them. They tried to convince to me to drop all interest in the property and go for something else, just so they could still lend to me. Then they tried to fiddle me out of the booking fee for the fixed rate - it was only because I chased them several times on this that I got it back - it was £300!

Then around 9 months after moving in I realised that the sellers had misrepresented the scale of the service charges on the flat. I had it in writing from them that they knew of no major repairs to the property that would affect the service charge, but actually it turned out they had been made aware of upcoming repairs, that were to cost almost £2000. We sorted it all out before getting to court, but it was all very stressful!

Thankfully thinsg seemed to have settled down now.

The actual puchase sailed through no problems, it was the actually getting an offer accepted on a house as the estate agents were constantly phoning asking me to up my offers, even though i was already about 5k over asking price.

The estate agents were great. We found our first home in a couple of months. It was our solicitors who were the problem. What we were told was a straight forward case turned into a nightmare. We were first time buyers, the vendors had another property they already owned so there was no chain at all. We were told it would take 5-6 weeks to complete. 13 weeks later with get a phone call from them to say they have completed. 5 mins later we get a phone call from the estate agents to say the money has been exchanged but contracts havn't!

My partner and i are first time buyers and have been trying to get a house for almost a year, the first one we saw and fell in love with was a nightmare, we called the estate agent and put in a offer 5k under the asking price (well you never know!:P ), we were the first offer on that property, the following day the estate agent called to tell us they had had a higher offer, we thought about it and went higher ourselves, it was still under the asking price so we knew we were o.k. this went on for a couple of day`s then the other bidder went quiet for 48 hour's, we thought we were in with a really good chance at this, after not hearing anything for the 48 hour's i rung the estate agent to find out what was happening (as far as we were aware our last bid was the highest) only to be told that the vendor had accepted an offer £500 over our's the previous day:huh: when i asked the estate agent why they had not contacted us when the higher offer came in her reply was "well because we had'nt heard from you in a couple of day`s we thought you had changed your mind" she then told us we could'nt offer more and the house was sold subjact to contract! We found out about 4 months later that is was a investor who had bought the property and guess who he hired to let it out for him :rant: .

The second property we fell in love with seemed to be going really smoothly we got our offer accepted almost straight away and everything was moving really fast....until we got the surney/valuers report back - the house was subsiding, terrible damp, the bay window was falling off due to bad double glazing, the roof was too heavy for the house, the electric's needed totally re-wiring, it had uneven=floor's due to the subsidence and on and on it went:o , the vendor payed for a professional to go in and do an estimate for the work - 10k just for the pinning + damp treatment! at that we thougt NO WAY so i called the estate agent to tell them we were pulling out he immediatly changed his tone of voice and said "well, can i ask you WHY!":huh: why on earth does he think! any way we have now had an offer accepted on another house we fell in love with and fingers crossed:? it all seems to be going well, survey is o.k., and everything is now with the solicitor`s! personally i think buying a house is one of the most stressful times in a person's life:nod:

That`s my rant over with!

We bought our first home last year and it was brill, we liked the house so much and seemed to hit it off with the owners that we offered the asking price and it was accept immediately after. Anyway, the only issue was the purson who they were buying their new off, but almost delayed the whole move, but otherwise it was plain sailing!!

personally i think buying a house is one of the most stressful times in a person's life:nod:

That`s my rant over with!

I hope everything goes ok this time! It's certainly all very stressful - I have migraines galore when I was buying mine.

We lost out on around 3 properties before finally getting a bid accepted even though we bid way over asking price on all of them. We then fell in love with a property and put in a good offer and it was accepted. At the time we were aware that thew vendor had not found a house but had been looking for a while so we didnt think it would be a problem. We had the survey done but held back on the searchs. 12 weeks on the vendor still hasnt found anywhere to live and we are soon coming to the end of our rental contract.The vendor claims she is putting in bids on other houses but as we have been informed they are around 20K below asking price she will never get one. I dont understand why the vendor is being so stupid as we bought there house for way over asking price! We have started to look for other houses but prices seem to have rose again since Dec and the base rate for the morgage looks set to rise again in August making our budget even lower.:rant: When does it come to an end we could be waiting infinately for the vendor to find a house.

Not my first buy but I had a total nightmare with my property. Won the sealed bid (£25K over advertised price) then basically discovered after completion the house had serious structural problems (and so did all the others on the road) and was declared unsafe by a Structural Engineer. Spent the next 3 1/2 years suing the Surveyor (Giant Corporate) for negligence and the Vendor for Misrepresentation. Eventually settled out of court but I lost £4K in legal fees as you only get back 70% of what you have spent if you win. My house is now having to be auctioned as it is not mortgageable.