Guide to Buying a Home

You have decided to buy a home - but what next? The maze of legal work, negotiations, dealing with surveyors and solicitors, finding a good mortgage deal and worrying about your deal falling through, on top of actually hunting down the home of your dreams, is enough to make anyone's hair stand on end.Buying a house is one of the biggest financial decisions that you will make in your life. It is a lengthy and complicated business, which while exciting is often fraught with stress and worry. But luckily there is a lot of good advice around helping you to make your home-buying experience as easy and problem-free as possible.

After finding a home you like, which can take anything from a few days to many months, the process from having your offer accepted to completion of the sale takes about 12 weeks. This is about twice as long as in many other countries - home-buying in Britain is a notoriously drawn-out business.

It is important to have a good understanding of the process as it will help you to avoid some of the most common hazards of home-buying.  Turtlehomes.co.uk has prepared an introduction to the home-buying process to help you to understand how it all works, how to plan it and what to watch out for. After reading this you should have a better idea of what to expect and how to set out to buy a home feeling prepared and ready to go!

Click HERE

Gloucester Housing Market Should Be The First To Recover

I read a very insightful article yesterday from a blogger that writes knowlegeably about the Gloucester Housing Market:

"The Gloucester property market is very depressed at the moment, the town, like towns across Britain has been left looking run-down by the closure of businesses, making many of the people as depressed as the property market.

Gloucester is not alone, the paragraph above could be about any number of towns the length and breadth of the UK. The other common trend shared by Gloucester and all (or certainly most) of the other towns is that it will not always be like this; things will recover, run-down will become thriving and the depression will gradually lift. Where Gloucester is unique however, is in how it will recover:

In all the other towns, the gradual recovery of the economy will bring improvements to the town; businesses will fill vacant shops, warehouses and office space, which will in turn make the place look less run down. At the same time the housing market will slowly pick up. All together the general outlook is for a gradual process with a long-run up to any house price growth.

But in Gloucester, there is the massive urban regeneration project. As we speak, work is in progress to not only make Gloucester look less run down, but to make it look beautiful. The project is a beneficiary of massive investment, which is being put back into the local area in buying materials and providing employment.

Therefore when the economic recovery begins, Gloucester will be well in front of the other towns up and down the country, and the housing market should receive an almost instant boost because of the regeneration."

turtlehomes.co.uk

Property Portals Rise Again

Back in 1996 there were just over 4 million internet users in the UK. Of these, only around 700,000 were searching for property, according to analysis of data from BMRB and comScore by the FindaPropetry.com research team.

Over the next eight years the internet grew but the percentage of people searching for property remained remarkably stable at around 18 per cent.

But then in 2004 it all changed. The internet population didn't rise massively – from 22,016,000 in 2003 to 23,620,000 in 2004 (+7.2 per cent) - but the percentage of people initiating a property search climbed to 27 per cent (from 18 per cent in 2003).

What changed in 2004? Two things. The housing market started to soar, and that undoubtedly drew more people to property portals, and broadband also took off in 2004.

The percentage of all internet users searching for property rose to an all time high of 31 per cent in 2006, moderated slightly in 2007 (29 per cent) and then slipped significantly to 19 per cent in 2008, as the credit crunch began to bite.

Interestingly, there's been a pick up in the percentage of property searchers since then – in the first quarter of 2009, 26% of the active internet population (which now stands at over 32 million adults) visited a property website.

Andrew Smith, FindaProperty.com's Head of Research says: "Consumers are attracted to property portals for a number of reasons; convenience, the range of properties on offer in one place and the ability to compile detailed information before contacting estate agents. 

"Multiple photos, floor plans and mapping are all functionality that we now take for granted however it wasn’t until the mass take-up of broadband that property portals were able to enhance the online property search experience.

"The Internet is now the first point of call for property searchers and it’s encouraging to see consumers beginning to return to the property portals in 2009."

turtlehomes.co.uk list our properties on over 30 of the top Property Portals to ensure that your property has the maximum exposure.

Conveyancing from £349+VAT

Whether you are moving house or want to find a better mortgage deal, you need to appoint a conveyancer to look after your legal interests and ensure everything progresses to completion without a hitch.

Our promise to you

We want to provide complete 'peace of mind'. Turtle Homes are now able to offer you a service that no other solicitors would dare to offer... A 'MONEY BACK GUARANTEE' for the solicitor’s legal fees. Our conveyancers have created, transparent and trackable standards that they promise to adhere to.

Our core value is centred on providing the highest level of customer service and client satisfaction. The conveyancing world is rapidly becoming more volume focused, with little emphasis placed on individual client care. RG Solicitors, value each instruction, and treat our clients as individuals, not as 'file numbers'. We are confident that once you experience our Conveyancing services, you will never look elsewhere for a solicitor when you move house!

Contact Turtle Homes now to find out more about Conveyancing from just £349+VAT

Turtle Homes embraces Twitter

turtlehomes.co.uk have today announced that they will be listing all new instructions on Twitter.

If you have a Tritter account you will now be able to see what turtlehomes.co.uk are doing.  We will keep you updated with new instrcutions and price changes.  If you don't have a twitter account please click here to join

The New York Times calls Twitter "one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet." TIME Magazine says, "Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app," and Newsweek noted that "Suddenly, it seems as though all the world's a-twitter."