Moving house - Tips

Finding and buying a new house

• Don't, repeat don't rely on registering with estate agents to get you news of new properties. From bitter experience, they might give you a flurry of choices at first, but these dry up - you must keep searching the web sites of your local estate agents yourself, several times each week, manually.
• Don't rely on aggregation sites like Rightmove, not all properties are listed on these systems and there's often a time delay - again, search yourself on the agents sites.
• Keep pestering estate agents by phone, asking about new properties, they'll often have something that's "just come in" and which won't appear on any web site for several days.
• When you do find the house of your dreams, consider putting in an offer of the full asking price - it's literally heartbreaking to offer a few thousand less than the full price (so that you think you've got a bargain) but then see your dream home lost to someone else putting in a higher offer.
• If possible, put your house on the market a few weeks before starting to look around in earnest, so that you can offer a price with a buyer already set up for your own property (below).

Selling your house

• Put the work in, cleaning and tidying your house and garden. It'll be well worth it, every hour's effort probably adds another few hundred pounds to the value of your house in a newcomer's eyes, surely more per hour than you could ever earn.
• Pay particular attention to clutter and 'stuff' in general. The less objects and furniture in a room, the more spacious it will appear to be. Stick what you can up in your loft and give away, sell or store other material possessions that you think fill up rooms too much.
• The lighter a room, the more attractive it will be. If you've gone for dark wallpaper or paint, you might like to consider redecorating before selling. When showing people round, consider turning on all the lights, even if it's daylight, to add an extra sparkle to each room.
• Don't rely on estate agents showing people round your house. You know it better than they, so if you can bear dealing with potential buyers then show them round yourself. You know all the good and bad points and can steer the conversation accordingly.
• Don't get your hopes up when a viewer says your house is 'lovely' or 'perfect'. 9 times out of 10 they're just being polite. Wait til you get a phone call from the estate agent confirming an actual offer. Even if the selling process goes very well, you can still expect to show more than 10 people round and have your house on the market for several weeks.
• You can't control the weather, of course, but you can help yourself by choosing the time of year to sell (spring is ideal, with some good weather and the potential for people to buy and still be 'in' by the new school year - even if your buyer hasn't got a family, the chances are that others in the 'chain' will, and many moving timetables come down to fitting in around the school year in some fashion.
• Keep a good eye on the weather forecast each week and try to schedule viewing times for your potential buyers that coincide with sunshine, avoiding rain, obviously, especially if you have a lovely garden that you'd like to show off!
• Remember you don't have to have a For Sale sign outside your house. 99% of buyers will find you anyway, through the internet or a personal word from your estate agent, and having a For Sale sign might put you in your neighbour's 'awkward' books. Sometimes it's best to stay 'low key'!

Mortgages

• If you've had previous dealings with a building society or if you have your life savings with one, then your choice of lender may be obvious, but otherwise you'd be wise to shop around. See in particular The Motley Fool Mortgage Service, which should help enormously.

Moving itself

• Make sure you get at least three quotes from different local removal firms, we found the prices varied widely, from £500 to £1000 in our case!
• You don't need to worry about buying storage boxes, every single moving firm will supply these in advance of the move, although they may ask for a deposit, which is fair enough.
• Avoid scheduling moving at a weekend (including Fridays, sometimes), if possible, moving firms will charge extra for these days!