It is very uplifting on a lovely spring day to see local communities coming together for fundraising events. The Great Hampshire Cake Sale has been organised by The Hampshire Hunt and The Hursley Hambledon Hunt in aid of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance. Their aim was to sell over 1,000 cakes and when I took along the cakes donated by The Country House Company I was overwhelmed by the huge amount of cakes, well over 1,000 by 11 am, and more were coming in all the time. The stand was laden with cakes of every description and behind were hundreds more ready to sell.
Red Nose day is a terrific national campaign encouraging the entire country to pull together to raise money for a wide range of charities. At The Country House Company we support as many local charities and fundraising events as possible providing financial support, signs, publicity, usually participation and always enthusiasm! It is one of the joys of being fully established and part of a community and just to make our Friday even better I have just had this email from a local fundraiser
“Marishelle, thank you for bringing a huge smile to my face on this somewhat grey Friday morning!! And will you please thank everyone at The Country House Company for their support which is really, really appreciated.”
Marishelle Gibson
Lots of column inches about villages in Hampshire with Hambledon featuring in a piece titled ‘Best Places To Live’ in the South East in HOME, the Sunday Times supplement, this last Sunday. Yesterday in Times 2, Preston Candover is featured 13th in an article entitled ‘Best Villages in Britain’. We love our county and these two villages are wonderful examples of the very best characteristics that the countryside can offer…community, facility, accessibility and glorious scenery over which one can walk, ride, run or cycle.
Patrick Glynn-Jones
The most recent articles on the property market have focused on the accuracy of guide prices when deciding to sell your property. Analysis of 37,000 sales by Which? found that 20% of properties that listed and went on to sell had to reduce the initial guide price by more than 5% costing the seller of this surveys average sale price of £260,000, £20,000 because those 20% ended up achieving less than the property’s true worth. These properties took an extra 64 days to sell too. Estate agents are held responsible for this.
Rightmove, the portal, released a bulletin about this too stating that sellers are 40% more likely to sell if priced correctly from launch. They also comment on price sensitivity in the market and how website traffic will quickly move on from properties that they perceive to be over priced even if only by a few percentage points.
This shows just how important accurate pricing can be in terms of time in the market and accordingly financially. Many sellers will have based their onward plans and perhaps purchase on the accuracy of the anticipated sale price and so the estate agent has a moral and ethical responsibility to show extreme due diligence when giving their opinion. With so little coming to market, the less scrupulous agent will pump the figure to win the business and then manage the price down over time…which according to Which? could be an enormously costly policy for the seller.
With an enviable ‘98% of guide price’ statistic for sales that we have completed over the last 12 months and over 80% of the sales we agree going on to complete, we have shown that we take our role as price setters extremely seriously and would never knowingly mislead our clients where the consequences are so great.
Patrick Glynn-Jones
The Country House Company has been appointed to sell this appealing ‘edge of village’ 4 bedrooms,
2 bathroom, house with a double garage, additional off street parking and charming garden. The
house is in Hambledon, a highly popular village. The guide price is £895,000.
This pretty Grade II Listed house offers particularly appealing and balanced family accommodation,
with a triple aspect drawing room that opens onto the garden being a particular feature. In the
centre of the house the family/dining room, with an open fireplace, links the drawing room and
kitchen/breakfast room. There is a generous study and overlooking the gardens to the south of the
house, the kitchen/breakfast room leads on to the timber framed double glazed and centrally
heated conservatory.
On the first floor, a wonderful master bedroom and bathroom suite, which occupies the same floor
area as the drawing room, is striking and situated to the back and side of the house overlooking the
orchard and garden. There are three further bedrooms served by a family shower room.
The well stocked gardens are on two sides of the house with a series of terraces, a lawn and wild
flower orchard under mature fruiting trees. Unusually for a village house, the gardens are secluded
and private. There is a greenhouse alongside the double garage together with a fenced swimming
pool and garden room. There is a gravelled driveway for easy off street parking in front of the
garage.
For a viewing please call Patrick on 02392 632275.
The Country House Company has been appointed to sell this charming 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom,
village house with a garage, additional off street parking and a charming south facing garden. The
house is in Hambledon, a highly popular village. The guide price is £950,000.
This delightful period village house provides charming family accommodation in the heart of
Hambledon. The brick and timber framed Grade II listed property dates from the early 16th century
and exhibits many lovely characteristics from that era with exposed beams and brickwork, a few
surviving wattle and daub panels, early mullion window detailing and a beautiful inglenook fireplace
to the dining hall albeit now closed off. The dual aspect sitting room provides views to the village
and also over the garden towards the down land hillside behind where race horses are trained. The
kitchen has a breakfast area, AGA and from here one can reach the family room.
There are 5 bedrooms including a light, spacious and voluminous master suite with dressing area,
very good fitted cupboard space and an en?suite bathroom with separate shower. There is also an
en?suite shower room to one of the further bedrooms and a family bathroom.
The property enjoys the morning sun to the front of the house and benefits from a gravelled
driveway for at least 4 cars, turning area and garage. The enclosed rear garden is mainly walled,
predominantly laid to lawn and orientated to the south and west.
For a viewing please call Patrick on 02392 632275.
On occasion our visits to see homeowners are about longer term and associated relationships and a meeting in Itchen Abbas earlier this week was one those instances. I am always fascinated by people’s proposals for major projects, in part born out of my deep held interest in architecture from a young age. A tour of the existing house moved on to a detailed discussion and review of the plans they have had drawn up to significantly re-model the house. Increasing the square footage by probably 40% and re-configuring some of the rooms will transform the house. I made a few suggestions, one of which they very much appreciated and will implement in the next round of plan amendments.
My visit was to assess the current likely sale price providing detailed reasoning for our opinion and then considering the effect of the significant works they propose on the ultimate likely sale price once complete. They were clear from the first telephone call that they would only sell now if the numbers weren’t viable. Fortunately for them, my deliberations concluded that they are and their plans will now progress to the next stage comfortable in the knowledge that the current and future likely sale price justify the significant investment they are about to make. They’ll almost certainly spend many years at the house once transformed. Whilst I may still be at The Country House Company when they do sell, the very great likelihood is that I won’t and in the meantime their very evident gratitude might prompt them to talk to friends and neighbours about our no obligation input and that we might benefit because we have offered best advice and not been tempted by short term gain which has never been our ethos.
Patrick Glynn-Jones
Credit to Rightmove who are making a major change to the management of agents and new listings on their site.
Unscrupulous agents will no longer be able to launch and then a few weeks later, take that same property off Rightmove in order to match out (property alert) to Rightmove subscribers again. Some properties are repeatedly removed and re listed and this is distorting the market data and deceiving. Neither will doing this within 14 weeks of the initial launch change the ‘Listing Date’ of the ORIGINAL launch….another method used by some to give the impression that the house has been on the market for a shorter time than is actually the case. This new policy will give buyers an accurate picture on marketing history and not deceive prospective buyers which is what happens currently when agents adopt this policy.