Yesterday, Edward Church, Head of Agency in Kent at Strutt & Parker, revealed his first five top tips to achieve your selling price. Today he reveals his final five to get the best price for your home Use your poker face: “If the house is worth £500,000, stick to your guns, play it cool and listen […]
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There are ways to make buying your first home easier. Here, OnTheMarket.com and the Money Advice Service explores some of them. Saving money for your deposit Before you start looking at properties you’ll need to start saving for a deposit. Generally, you need to try to save at least 5% to 20% of the cost […]
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Long gone are the days when a landlord or letting agent simply handed a new tenant the keys, recommended a good local pub, shook hands and left. The landlords and letting agents of the 21st century are expected – and required by law – to provide tenants with documentation running to many pages. In addition […]
The post Legalities for tenants: Landlord and agent obligations appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.
It’s everyone’s worst nightmare. You enter your home to discover someone has broken in and stolen your most treasured possessions. It’s a horrible feeling that no one should have to go through. It is also important to remember that there is no guarantee in stopping a burglar and therefore having insurance is critical. Burglars tend […]
The post How to make your house burglar-proof on a low budget appeared first on OnTheMarket.com blog.
Readers with no debt who want to move closer to work and a good school seek advice
Q My husband and I own a home worth about £400,000 which is now totally mortgage free. He commutes a long way to work each day and as we have two young children, we are considering moving to the town where he works. Property there is more expensive, but the schools are good and the children would benefit from seeing more of their father during the week. Ideally we would like to make a step up and buy a detached family home, which in the area we want (where there’s a school we like) would cost about £725,000. We would need to borrow £325,000 to do this. I am a stay-at-home mum but my husband earns £48,000 per year plus about £8,000 in commission.
I have heard about mortgages where you can borrow more than the typical 3.5 times annual income which we would probably need to apply for. We feel we can afford to stretch our finances to take on the extra borrowing as we have no other debts or loans and have some savings in the bank. We could accommodate the repayments in our monthly household budget. Can you please advise us on how to access these type of mortgages, where do we find them and how can we maximise our chances of being approved for the mortgage loan?
XF
The Chelsea Hotel has been home to cultural icons from Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol for decades. As controversial renovations continue, Colin Miller photographs the hotel’s last remaining apartments and their residents
In 2015, an architecture firm approached me to take some photographs of the renovations they’d made to the historic Chelsea Hotel after the building was sold. The photographs I took were forgettable, but when I looked down the iron staircase I saw something of the hotel’s former glory. Pieces of the tenants’ artwork decorated the stairwell and amid the construction mess were visible signs of a vibrant community of residents who cared deeply for their home. I had only a vague sense of the Chelsea then, primarily through the film Sid and Nancy and from living in New York on the edge of the punk scene.
An aura of fame and creativity emanated from the hotel. Former residents include Allan Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Stanley Kubrick, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith; Dylan Thomas and Nancy Spungen died there; Madonna lived and shot her Sex book there, and Leonard Cohen wrote two songs about the affair he had there with Janis Joplin. Struck by what I had seen, I set out to photograph the homes of the last remaining residents before the historic units were further sterilised. The Chelsea’s demise was imminent; I had a precious few months before it would all disappear.
Continue reading...There’s not much to do for the garden except plan, so it’s time to start scrolling through social media for inspiration
I don’t know about you, but, as someone with an obsession with the botanical world, the dark days of December are always a source of huge frustration for me. It’s not just that as plants slide into dormancy and you don’t get to see as much growth and life around you, but you have only a few fleeting hours of daylight in which to do so. Add to that the fact that the ground is often so sodden that stepping on it can damage soil structure, meaning whole swathes of most gardens become no-go zones, and it can feel like living with your hands tied behind you.
Fortunately, technology has come to the rescue for me. Thanks to the amazing connectivity of Instagram, even when it is soaking wet and pitch black outside, I can learn fascinating horticultural techniques, discover new plants I had never heard of before and drool over the work of the world’s best garden designers. I feel it has democratised garden media in a way never seen before, opening us up to all sorts of global influences. So here are my current favourite accounts that are “must follows” this winter, to inspire you for the spring.
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