Originally Posted by
az_gila
But was it a hidden unknown defect or did the buyers just not have a good home inspection? (err... I think survey is the UK term...)
If you purchase something that is known bad - caveat emptor.
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---------- Post added at 03:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:51 PM ----------
Yes, your parents might have thought of it as "theirs", but did all of their neighbors? - that is the problem.
My parents bought their house in 1950 and tell me they had to scrimp and save with two small kids to afford it. My mum still lives there. She still says that was the only thing she wanted back then, her own house - after her two kids, I presume...
In thirty years your parents would have even paid off the mortgage.
Yes that is the problem. There were/are some great streets and tenants and some shockers (in the same houses - go figure Chas). There were plenty prepared to sit in a mess. Too many saying "it's not down to me".
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As it happens, my parents were lucky. They managed to get out of St John's when that really started to go down (back up again now...). Perhaps because they were 'decent folk'.
I'm not sure they would have afforded the mortgage
and run the property. And lending was a bit more responsible those days. Of course they didn't have access to the securities a council could offer to a lender. They both worked later on, so maybe.
As it happens, they bought it with Dad's redundancy. After twenty years' renting there, it was cheap - I'd like to think only what was left on the council mortgage. So, maybe they did 'only' pay the mortgage after all (but after 40 years in the one job, straight from the army) - no such thing as a free ride.
Houses should be for living in, not profiting from (I wish). Maybe the status attached to anyone's house is inevitable but we are deluded if we think we own it if we're paying more than two days a week's wages for a bigger than 70% mortgage.
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And what fantastically efficient 'taxation' that is! More than 40% on
gross wages. A tax on living. Only problem is it's going to the banks to pay for, whatever it is they do with it - not to government to pay for services.
And as prices rise, how clever are we? We're so wealthy now! Problem with that is we couldn't afford to buy our own homes and our children can't 'get on the ladder' (to what?). You could say the banks were milking us and you might be right.
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So little old us can't fight that. Not even council can fight that - on the shoestring budgets of what 'we' pay them and in the face of some pretty vindictive vandalism.
Perhaps the collective bodies that can, are estate owners, body corporates, housing associations and local authorities. Acting as 'social owners' but not there to wipe anyone's bum at every turn - owners, tenants and leaseholders have got to do their bit (and that would include looking after the property they own and occupy. And doing condition surveys...).
The Grovesnors have been doing it for hundreds of years.
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