To buy or not to buy... (And Fulham beat Liverpool :-)

Cape Town was beautiful last weekend with sunshine and +30C. I almost forgot that we heading towards winter in the southern hemisphere...

We have also been looking at more houses and have seen one that we think is (or was) worth buying. This house is located in Edgemead a suburb outside Cape Town. However the estate agent thought that our offer was too low for the seller to accept… Our offer was about 8% below the asking price. The thing is that you can now check on the internet what the seller bought the house for and what other houses in that street was sold for. It is a quite neat service called Sold Price Index or Property SPI. So we do know that our offer is not unreasonable even if we could increase it a little bit. But I guess it is easy to get carried away when you are about to sell and the estate agent have told you what your property is worth. I don't think even our final bid will reach what the seller wants... Another estate agent told us "You can always take off 5% on a correctly priced house" and we are sticking to that in this case since we would need to do some minor alterations anyway, if we did buy the hose.

The state of the SA housing market is otherwise a bit crazy and the prices has sky-rocketed the last couple of years. For example: The house we are looking at right now, has increased by 75% in less then 3 years, if the seller gets the asking price. Another thing is that the interest rates are about 10-12.5% which is about 3 times more than in the UK and Sweden :-(
(To be continued ...)

Fulham FC won the important home game against Liverpool on Sunday with 1-0. Let's hope that "the Whites" can pull their socks up and stay up in the Premiership this year too. Fulham has otherwise applied a strategy which is to sell all players that are performing well and then blame the coach if team is not winning any games!