Looking for information

[Anski]

We are a retired couple in our 70's who are returning to England after spending many years away  living in various countries. Our dilemma is do we buy an existing house/flat or do we  buy a new home from one of the many building companies?
I hope by joining this site I will be able to make a better informed decision & avoid many of the pitfalls that unfortunately can  happen.

 

[New Home Expert]

Welcome to the forum.

The advantage of buying an existing house is that you can see what you are buying, have a full survey done before exchanging contracts so you know in advance if there are any issues and can lower your offer to reflect them and you can see what the neighbourhood is like.

With a new house you cannot do any of these things.
More importantly, 99% of those buying new homes report defects to their housebuilder in a matter of weeks 42% more than ten defects.  Most housebuilders are not very pro active in sorting the defects out!

The NHBC spend around £90million fixing serious defects in around 11,000 new homes each year.
Whether you buy one of these is a lottery.

Buy what you can actually see and survey and pay the right fair market price.
That's not going to be a new build home!

[Anski]

Love the  website & hope to get lots of advice to help in our mission.  Pretty depressing to hear of so many new build problems as many existing homes decor etc not to our liking. We also prefer shower to bath as I find cleaning a bath difficult & showers over bath dangerous stepping in & out. So we would remove bath & replace with shower in existing home but hopefully negotiate with new build to get exactly what we want.