morning all, first post here so bear with me. i’m 48, single, currently back living with family after leaving a rental i’d been in for years. not ideal but it is what it is. i have about 95k saved up and a modest income, nothing spectacular, maybe 22k a year. i don’t want a mortgage if i can avoid it, the idea of debt at this stage just doesn’t appeal. been looking at places in the midlands and parts of the north east where you can still get a one bed flat or small terrace for under 100k, some of them look decent enough on rightmove anyway. my question is whether buying outright with no mortgage is actually straightforward or whether there are hidden costs that eat into it, stamp duty, solicitor fees, surveys etc. i guess i’m also wondering if anyone has done this and whether the really cheap properties end up being money pits. one option could be buying something that needs work and doing bits myself, another option is getting something move in ready for a bit more. any thoughts welcome, i have no idea what i’m doing honestly
Can’t speak for the north east but round here anything under 80k tends to come with a catch. Ex-council with a dodgy roof, or a terrace backing onto an industrial estate. Had a look for a friend last year and everything in that bracket needed at least 10-15k of work before you’d want to sleep in it. Not saying it can’t be done but budget for surprises.
@jmb79_options, the good news is that at 95k you are under the stamp duty threshold for a first purchase, so that is zero. Solicitor fees for a cash purchase are typically £800 to £1,500 depending on where you go. Searches around £250 to £400. A homebuyer’s survey is another £300 to £500, or more if you go for a full building survey, which on a cheap property I would strongly recommend.
So you are looking at maybe £1,500 to £2,500 in total buying costs, give or take. That still leaves you with a reasonable budget if you are looking at places around 80 to 90k.
My neighbour’s son bought a terrace in County Durham for about 72k a couple of years ago. Looked fine on the surface but he ended up spending close to 12k on rewiring, a new boiler, and sorting out some subsidence at the back. A proper survey would have flagged at least two of those. Do not skip the survey just because you are not being forced to by a lender; that is the one area where cash buyers sometimes come unstuck.
@halfpenny_doris is right about properties at this end of the market, and it applies beyond the East Midlands. My wife and I looked at a handful of cheaper flats early in our own search (before settling on the leasehold we are now buying) and the pattern was remarkably consistent. Anything genuinely under £100,000 in a reasonable area was either ex-local authority with a problematic lease, had service charges that made the low purchase price somewhat illusory, or needed work that would have pushed the total outlay well beyond what you would pay for something habitable from the outset.
@jmb79_options, with £95,000 in savings and no mortgage requirement you are in a stronger position than many first-time buyers, but I would urge caution about rushing into a purchase simply because you can afford the asking price. A cash buyer at this level is attractive to vendors, which means you have some negotiating leverage, but you also need to keep a meaningful contingency fund. If the boiler fails in month two and you have spent everything on the purchase, you are in a worse position than you were renting.
@jmb79_options I’m searching in a similar price bracket in the East Midlands so I feel your pain. One thing to watch out for, if you end up looking at ex-council flats, is the lease length and who the freeholder is. I nearly got burned on a flat with 78 years left and an absent freeholder, which would have made extending the lease a nightmare. At your budget you might be better off looking at freehold terraces even if they need a bit of cosmetic work. Cash buyers get taken more seriously so you do have that going for you.
thanks everyone, really helpful stuff. @Caldweld that is a good point about the contingency, i hadnt really thought about it like that. if i spend 85-90k on the property itself how much would people keep back as a safety net? i’m still earning, take home about 1600 a month, so it’s not like i’d have zero income. but i take the point about boilers etc, my old rental had a boiler die in january and the landlord spent about 3k replacing it.
@jmb79_options, the honest answer is as much as you can possibly bear to keep back. When we bought our place I thought £3,000 would cover any nasty surprises in the first year. I was wrong by a factor of about three; the boiler went in November, the bathroom waste pipe decided to part company with the soil stack in January, and then we discovered the fascia boards were rotten on the side we never looked at.
For a property in the 85-90k bracket you are almost certainly looking at something that needs work. I would say £5,000 absolute minimum as a contingency fund, and £8,000-10,000 if you can stretch to it. The solicitor fees, surveys, and moving costs will eat another £2,000 or so before you even get the keys. So if your total pot is around 100k, spending 85k on the purchase leaves you quite thin on the ground. Something closer to 75-80k on the property itself might be more sensible, unexciting as that sounds.
been spending most of the weekend on rightmove and zoopla looking at stuff in county durham and sunderland area, honestly its a bit depressing. anything under 80k that looks liveable gets snapped up or turns out to have some massive issue when you dig into it. theres a couple of terraces around 65-70k but one has no central heating at all and the other is leasehold with a ground rent that doubles every 10 years which i know from reading this forum is a massive red flag. i keep seeing auction properties come up cheaper, sometimes 50-60k for a 2 bed terrace that looks ok in the photos. has anyone here actually bought at auction? i guess my worry is you cant get a proper survey done beforehand and you’re committed once the hammer falls. with my budget being what it is i cant really afford a nasty surprise
Don’t touch auction properties on your budget. Neighbour two doors down bought a terrace at auction for 52k, looked fine in the photos. Needed a new roof, full rewire, and the drains were collapsed. Ended up spending more on the repairs than the house. You can view beforehand but you can’t rip up floorboards or get a proper survey, so you’re basically gambling.
@jmb79_options, auctions are not necessarily the horror show that some people make out, but @halfpenny_doris is right that on a tight budget the risk is amplified because you have no margin for error. The key thing most people miss is that auction properties come with a legal pack which you can download beforehand, sometimes weeks before the auction. Get a solicitor to look at that pack before you bid. It costs a couple of hundred quid but it is the single best money you can spend.
The other thing worth knowing is that you can get a surveyor to do an external inspection and a limited internal viewing before the auction date. It is not the same as a full building survey but it is a lot better than going in blind. I know someone who bought a two-bed terrace in Darlington at auction about three years ago for £58k, spent £12k on it and it has been fine. But he is a builder, which helps somewhat 
thanks @greenwhistle_hants, decided to steer clear of auctions for now. one thing i keep noticing on the listings is that the council tax bands vary massively even on similar properties, like two bed terraces in the same town but one is band A and the other band C. is there any way to challenge the band or is it basically set in stone? at my budget every £50 a month matters so the difference between band A and C is actually significant
@jmb79_options, you can challenge the band through the Valuation Office Agency but I would be cautious about doing so. The VOA can look at the property and decide your band should actually be higher, not lower, and there is no mechanism to withdraw the challenge once you have started it. It cuts both ways.
The bands were set based on 1991 property values, which is why you get some odd results. A terrace that had an extension done before 1993 might have been rebanded at the time, while an identical one next door stayed at band A. It is not always logical but it is not arbitrary either.
One thing worth doing before you buy is checking the council tax band on the VOA website and comparing it against similar properties on the same street. If they are all band A and your one is band C, that might be worth querying. But if the street is a mix, I would leave well alone and factor the cost in from the start.
quick update, found a two bed terrace in ferryhill listed at 72k, looks decent in the photos and the EPC is a D which isnt great but not awful. council tax band A so thats manageable. only thing thats bugging me is the listing says cash buyers only which usually means theres something the mortgage lender wont touch, right? is it worth getting a survey done before i even put an offer in or do you wait until after
Ferryhill is cheap for a reason. Not saying don’t do it but check what the street looks like on Street View and whether there are any boarded up houses nearby. Also a D rated EPC means you’ll be spending a fair bit on heating through winter. Have you looked at what it would cost to get it up to a C? Could be thousands you haven’t budgeted for.
yeah @halfpenny_doris you were right, had a proper look on street view and theres two boarded up houses on the same street plus what looks like a mattress dumped on the pavement. crossed that one off the list. now looking at a couple of places in hartlepool, slightly more expensive around 78-82k but the streets look a lot better. one of them even has a small garden which would be nice. going to try and book some viewings this weekend if i can.
so ive basically written off county durham now, every time i find something that looks alright theres always a catch. been looking a bit further south, some of the stuff around barnsley and rotherham is interesting, couple of two bed terraces around 80-85k that dont look completely grim on street view. one in wombwell has a C rated EPC which is miles better than anything ive seen so far. problem is i dont know the area at all so hard to tell if its a decent street or not. anyone from south yorkshire who can give me a steer? also wondering whether i should just accept that 70-80k is too low to get anything liveable and adjust my budget up to 90-95k, which means eating into my contingency fund. i guess the nationwide data showing yorkshire prices going up nearly 4% a year doesnt help either, things arent getting cheaper while i sit here thinking about it
Don’t know Wombwell specifically but a friend’s son rented in Barnsley for a couple of years and said it was fine, not glamorous but perfectly liveable. Think you’ve answered your own question though. If everything under 80k has a catch then 80k is too low. Better to spend 90 and have a contingency than buy cheap and find you need a new boiler in December.
spent most of yesterday evening on rightmove again looking around the barnsley area properly this time. theres a few two bed terraces in wombwell and darfield around 85-90k which is a bit above what i wanted to spend but they look like actual houses people live in, not project nightmares. one on a street called cemetery road which is a bit of an off-putting name but the house itself looked solid, new boiler fitted 2023 according to the listing. i keep going back and forth on whether to just offer on something like that or whether i should be looking at shared ownership instead, does anyone know if you can even do shared ownership without a mortgage? i have about 95k in savings so i could buy a 50% share of something worth 180k outright in theory, but i dont know if the housing associations insist on a mortgage being in place. might be overthinking this. the other thing is i noticed a couple of these barnsley terraces have been on since november which makes me think theres room to negotiate
Shared ownership without a mortgage, not sure that’s even a thing they’d entertain. The whole point from their end is you take a mortgage on your share. Friend’s daughter did shared ownership on a flat in Nottingham a few years back and the rent on the housing association’s share plus the service charge was nearly as much as renting privately would have been. If you’ve got 95k cash and you’re looking at 85k houses, just buy one outright. Much simpler, much less hassle.
yeah so ive been thinking about this over the weekend and im starting to have second thoughts about buying at all. the barnsley places look alright on paper but then i start adding up the costs, surveys, solicitors, stamp duty, and then once youre in theres boiler servicing and insurance and council tax and all the rest of it. on 85k thats basically half my savings gone on the purchase alone before i even factor in furniture and fixing anything that needs doing.
i guess the question is whether its better to have a cheap roof over my head that i own, or keep my savings liquid and rent something modest while i figure out what i actually want long term. the rental market round there is pretty cheap too, maybe 400-450 a month for a two bed. i keep going back and forth on it honestly.