Having spent a career in property, keeping an eye on the property market for me is like an addiction, a habit I can’t kick, not an obsession but I find myself in need of a regular “fix”. You may well have seen two headline stories about London properties in the national press this week but if you didn’t you might find the following as intriguing as I did.
The first story relates to a couple who have just lost a court case to their neighbours who successfully sued them for encroaching onto their land (by less than two inches!) after building an extension. The £80,000 extension has been proven to have been built a mere 68mm onto the neighbours land and the presiding judge has ordered that the boundary wall of the offending extension be moved back which means the extension will need demolishing.
Giving his ruling, the judge said: “One of the sad features of the case is that before the parties began building new extensions to the rear of their property, they lived in harmony and were on good terms. The defendants say they built the wall in exactly the same position as the previous wall, which was in position for 41 years. I find that that is, to the defendants’ knowledge, wholly untrue. The joint expert surveyor concluded in his report there was an encroachment of 68mm. The wall erected by the defendants is encroaching on the claimants’ land.”
As well as having to pay their own costs, he ordered the defendants to pay their neighbours’ lawyers bills – estimated at almost £100,000, with £49,009 up front. The total cost of the case was estimated by lawyers outside court at around £200,000, on top of which the defendants will face the costs of taking down and rebuilding their extension. An expensive lesson to be learned here.
The second story is a far more upbeat account of the sale last week by auction of a Hampstead townhouse (not the one in the main photograph) which had never before been on the market and which smashed its guide price of £850,000 – £1 million ultimately selling for £1.81 million.
SDL Property Auctions put the house, 2 Well Road, up for auction and were not surprised to see significant early interest from registered bidders with 75 names down for this first lot of the day. Keen interest in the Victorian property may well have helped them break an in-house record as a spokesman for SDL commented: “We’ve had the most ever registered bidders across the whole of our auction today, at over 1,000.”
It’s easy to assume that at £1.8 million the house would be pretty special inside, however images reveal the house is in need of significant improvement. After taking auction fees into account, the unknown buyer will be handing over close to £1.9 million for a home with section 11 and 12 improvement notices, which require the buyer to carry out remedial action within a certain timeframe in accordance with the Housing Act 2004. Reconfiguration is also required as currently the four-storey townhouse is divided into two flats.
The new owners won’t be short of company as the house was sold as part vacant as an elderly gentleman has an assured tenancy for the lower flat. It’s all about location and potential with this house as the east end of Well Road connects directly to Hampstead Heath and the street is within easy walking distance of shops and restaurants in the north London neighbourhood’s villagey centre.
Auctioneer Andrew Parker highlighted the unusual history of the house, which was built in the late 19th century and hasn’t changed hands outside the family since. It is understood that after around 150 years in the same family, two cousins that recently inherited the house decided it was finally time to sell.
The purchase should prove to be a safe bet as by comparison the house next door was sold for £2.6 million in 2014 and a similar terrace down the road reached £2.95 million in 2019. On that basis, even after buying at £1.9million and if the new owner ended up spending a further £1 million renovating it they still stand to make a profit if they sold, all things being equal and assuming the property market doesn’t crash.
Rye attracts it’s fair share of DFLs (down from Londoners) and if London property keeps selling at these levels perhaps we will continue to see more Londoners coming here to buy. House prices locally are high but to buyers coming here from London they probably seem reasonable in comparison to London, particularly when you consider how much Rye and the local area has to offer.
Image Credits: No Swan So Fine https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.