markets, transactions, money, tenure, streets
12guides on the floor
On the floor
This site is a written reference about housing and place. It explains how a local housing market actually works, what moves prices in it, what happens between an accepted offer and a set of keys, what a survey and a set of searches are for, what a mortgage is in plain terms, how renting and owning really compare, and how residential streets came to look the way they do.
It is arranged like an exhibition board rather than a blog: the twelve guides stand alone, in no required order, and each one states at the top what it covers and what it does not. Nothing here is advice about a particular property, a particular loan or a particular contract, and no property is offered, valued or marketed anywhere on this site.
Guides
Each row gives the hall it belongs to, the form it takes, how long it runs and the question it sets out to answer.
A housing market is not a market in the way a supermarket or a share exchange is a market. It is a thin, slow auction of objects that are never quite alike, run by people who mostly cannot leave and mostly cannot wait.
A purchase looks like one event and is really about a dozen, most of which happen out of sight. Knowing the order of them is the difference between a stressful transaction and a merely slow one.
A survey is an opinion about a building formed on one day, from what could be seen without taking anything apart. Its value depends almost entirely on how deep the inspection was allowed to go.
A mortgage is two things bolted together: a loan, and a security interest in the property that backs it. Almost every feature of the product follows from the second half of that sentence.
The argument that rent is dead money and a mortgage is not is too crude to be useful. Both tenures contain money that never comes back. The honest comparison is between the two sets of unrecoverable costs, plus everything that is not money.
Most of what determines whether a street will suit a household is visible from the pavement, and almost none of it is in the listing. This is a guide to looking.
Every one of the twelve pages is built the same way, so it can be scanned before it is read.
Reading order
| Stage | Hall | Subject | Why it comes here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Market | How a local market works | Everything else assumes you know why the market is slow. |
| 2 | Market | What moves prices | Separates the durable level from the monthly movement. |
| 3 | Transaction | Buying, stage by stage | The sequence the rest of the transaction pages hang from. |
| 4 | Transaction | Surveys, searches and title | The two checks that decide whether a purchase survives. |
| 5 | Money | Mortgages and affordability | Read after the sequence, because the money follows the offer. |
| 6 | Place | Tenure and the street itself | The part that is a decision about life rather than arithmetic. |
Take-away sheets
Where to go next
A question about a specific property, a specific loan or a specific contract is not a question this site can answer. Those belong with a qualified professional who can see the papers.