Buying a house? do it online

Searching for property online has been part of a homebuyers toolkit for a number of years, but now you can carry out virtually the whole process over the internet.

In days of yore to be able to buy a property you had to visit an estate agent, go and see a solicitor and have meetings with your mortgage broker. This could be so time consuming and costly too – petrol, car parks, the value of your time. However, times (as they say) are changing. The property-buying world is lurching into the twenty-first century.

You want to know how much you should offer on a property? Check it out online. You want to find the best mortgage deal? Find out on the internet. You want to appoint a mortgage broker to find you the best mortgage deal? Track one down online. You want to find a solictor? You to find your dream home? It’s all there – a few clicks of a mouse away!

To start with you probably want to find somewhere to live – the house of your dreams. There are of course major property websites such as rightmove.co.uk and findaproperty.com, but you should also look at the websites of local estate agents in the area you’re searching. You don’t need to hop in the car to drive round and find who those estate agents are though; just type estate agents and the locality into Google and you’ll get a fine list to choose from. The list of properties on these sites will have a wider range and be more up to date for the srea you’re looking at. Also, try EstateAngels and other smaller sites such as housenetwork.co.uk and Tesco’s new site tescopropertymarket.com which have house being sold directly by the vendor. Alliance & Leicester believe that around 10% of vendors now do not use an estate agent, but sell their homes themselves.

How can you gauge the right price for a property? You could talk to estate agencies or trawl through six weeks of local property newspapers, but an easier way would be to sit at your computer and check out 30 or 40 properties there. Ononemap.com compiles data for all the top property websites and puts them all onto a single map. This gives you the opportunity to not only search for properties, but also to view properties recently sold in your area (for selling) or in your target area (for buying). You also get photographs and descriptions. If the property you are thinking of buying changed hands in the last seven years, then you will be able to see the actual details about it as it was.

The actual prices paid for property in the past are available for all streets from the Land Registry – again this is particualrly relevant if the property you are looking at was bought in the last seven years as you can find the actual price it was sold for. The infromation is available at nethouseprices.com – all you need is the property’s postcode.

If you can get that information, then you ncan use Nationwide’s quarterly house price index to enable you to come up with a value for what it should be worth today. This calculator is available at Nationwide.co.uk.

Having saved money elsewhere you could usefully spend £20 to get an online report on a particular property’s value from Hometrack. Their database has more than 15 million valuations by surveyors.

If you are not sure about mortgages and how to get the best deal, and what is right for you, again help is at hand online. You can look at various Best Buy Tables, such as the one on Motley Fool (fool.co.uk). Using a mortgage calculator (for example at mortgage-house.co.uk) you can enter your mortgage period and determine your monthly repayments for either a repayment mortgage or an interest-only mortgage.

There are also fees calculators available to let you work out the total cost of the deal, including fees, giving you all the information you need to compare different deals fully.

Another way is to find a mortgage broker, and these can be found online too. You can find a fee-free broker via the Motley Fool Mortgage Service. The broker will be able to recommend a deal for you from the whole of the market that suits your needs and circumstances.

Those solicitor’s fees can mount up, but ou can save on the money and time spent with solicitors by using an e-conveyancer, a web-based service that gives you a list of competitive, specific quotes from a range of over 150 covenyancing firms. Make a selection and you can instruct them with a left-click of your mouse. Your conveyancing is underway! You will never meet you conveyancer – so what? This will work out a whole lot cheaper than your local solicitor – and save you tiome too.