Heads Up, First Time Buyers.
Here is a bit of a heads up for all you first-time buyers.
The average household income needed to purchase a typical home in a UK city has reached £54,400. That is a rise of £4,500 over the last three years. But it could be worse, Londoners need to earn £84,000. Liverpudlians, on the other hand, can buy on an average household income of £26,137, that should make them calm down, calm down.
Currently, developers are offering incentives for first-time buyers. Everything from iPads to a year’s mortgage payments to lure buyers.
So, are these deals too good to be true? If a developer faces fierce competition in a certain area, the incentives could genuinely be a bonus.
A word of caution, accepting add-ons may have an impact on the mortgage that you are offered. You need to declare anything added to a sale that may alter the loan-to-value ratio. It may also be that many incentives are merely a trick by developers to lure buyers into overpriced properties in a slow market when they should instead be dropping prices.
It’s easy for a first-time buyer to get bamboozled by these incentives and lose sight of the primary objective, which is to buy the best possible property, on the best terms, at the best price. Working with a professional mortgages broker such as McCoy Mortgages will ensure you achieve your objective.
Ask yourself, do you want a £9,000 car thrown in with your house, or would you rather have £50,000 off the price?
There are, however, ways to take advantage of a developer’s weak spot. To drive future sales, it helps if a developer can tell prospective buyers that it has already sold a property in a new development. So haggle for the very best deal you can get if you are one of the first to buy in a new development. Remember also that developers generally report their accounts twice a year, at the end of June and before Christmas. Try to buy in the weeks leading up to these times, because developers are more likely to drop prices to make their sales figures look more impressive.
