Having now started my West Midlands flat hunt i'm surprised by what i'm finding.
I've been telling people that i'm reluctant to move because I think I have the lowest rent in existence for a one bedroom flat. I was under the impression that I wouldn't find anything similar for anything like the same price. I was wrong.
Not only that, but it seems a lot of the "luxury" apartments, which really just means anything refurbished within the last 5 years are available at far lower prices than expected in very central areas.
Originally set on setting up in Solihull i've had a change of heart - started thinking about how much I like being walking distance from... pretty much everything. Solihull is a town of many amenities and a nice place to be, but as much as I like the pleasantness (lots of green, very little litter), the thought of living there has suddenly given me the "closing the lid on youth and retiring into middle age" feeling. I'm nowhere near ready for that yet.
The new plan is Birmingham, South Central. There's loads available at all kinds of prices. 2 bedroom apartments for £100 less a month than studios with fold down beds in similar areas. Crazy!
The buy to let culture seems to have had the effect of creating a letting price war that I had assumed hadn't started trickling down yet. Couldn't be more pleased that I was wrong about that.
Finally for today, i'd like to extend my appreciation to rightmove.co.uk. The site itself isn't much more complicated than the type of lettings search engine most agencies have, but the sheer amount of participation in this aggregation makes this the only service I need for this type of search.
At the moment I am plotting pins on a saved Google My Map with links to the rightmove pages. It occurs to me that the ability to do this automatically within the site would be a very useful feature, and probably be quite possible with the Google Maps API. I think this type of thing is what we're still missing on many sites at the moment..
Designers and developers are so blinded by the 2007 idea of adding social networking features to their sites at all costs that they're ignoring the benefits of adding non-social user-profile based features. I picture somebody deciding not to add something like the above because they can't find a way to realise benefits from letting users share their house buying/letting experience with each other.
The bottom line is i'd like to record the properties i'm interested in, and see their locations on a map with simple links back to the details, but I have no desire to share this with anyone else - if anything I want to keep it very private. Both the house buying and letting markets are competitions and i'm hardly going to gain an advantage by building a list of all the best finds and then shipping it to other people similar to myself who are likely looking for the same. This is no reason not to build the feature just for me though - it would keep me coming back for certain.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment