Are house buyers “panic buying”?

Most people think panic buying is when you buy bread and milk when snow is forecast, but Aviva’s latest research has found that the property market is so short of stock that buyers spent, on average, just over half an hour viewing their new home, rather than taking time to check the property over thoroughly.

 24 per cent of buyers made just one visit to their new home before agreeing to buy it, even more amazingly, out of 1,139,930 homes purchased in the calendar year to May 2014, 40,000 people bought a property in the UK last year without seeing it at all – that’s 3.75 per cent.

Renewed competition and rising prices have combined to make many buyers more pressurised to snap up a property quickly,” said Heather Smith, Marketing Director at Aviva. “Our research showed that buyers in the past year devoted under 10 seconds to looking round a property for every £1,000 they spent purchasing it.”

Aviva’s interest stems, of course, from its insurance claims, claims, that they would rather not have to pay, so they have issued a checklist to tell people what they should look at before committing to buying a property.

“We believe it’s important to arm yourself with the right information, that’s why we created the house viewing checklist, an interactive tool that will help home buyers spot common problems.”

http://aviva.co.uk/home/house-checklist

It all seems like common sense, but if buyers are committing in that space of time, the likelihood of finding problems once you have moved in is clearly much greater. The Aviva checklist does not pretend to replace a survey – something that every homebuyer should have, but it may encourage people to avoid rushing in to a purchase that may have underlying problems.