Discovering that her lender thought it was worth only £320,000 was a huge shock. “It was crazy,” added Lea, who runs business membership community The HoLT and works as a LinkedIn trainer.
“The house was really nicely done and a lot bigger than the other houses of the estate so I thought the price was fair, but I couldn’t just find the extra money and I spoke to a financial adviser who warned me I could end up being in negative equity if I did.
“I wasn’t going to buy a house for £30,000 more than the bank was saying it was worth, so I had to pull out. It was incredibly stressful because I had thought it was going to happen and we’d be in by Christmas.”
At the same time, Dr Michele McDowell, a child psychologist, was planning a move from north London to Northampton.
She had no problem selling her two-bedroom flat in Kingsbury for £330,000, but buying a follow-on home was a nightmare
With her flat under offer, Michele, 53, found a house she loved – a three-bedroom terrace on the market for circa £280,000. To secure the property she offered £285,000 and started getting excited about the move.
Then the rug was pulled out from under her feet; her mortgage company valued the property at £275,000. Unable to bridge the gap herself by putting down a bigger deposit, Michele tried her luck with another lender. Its valuation came in at £270,000.
“My vendors were in a chain themselves, so they couldn’t afford to reduce the price, and I lost my faith in the house because the mortgage companies said it was not worth the money I had offered,” she said.
“It was incredibly stressful at the time because I had already got my flat in London sold so I was under a lot of pressure to buy somewhere quite quickly.”
Happily, Michele went into property search overdrive and found a larger and better located home which she paid £292,000 for. “The whole thing was traumatic, but it worked out really well in the end,” she said.
