Welcome to your September edition of the Fish Need Water newsletter!

Here’s what we’ve got coming up:

• Fishneedwater move into Commercial Property
• Sellers: fortune favours the fast!
• Landlords: here’s an easy way to make your tenants like you!
• The top news this month.
• Top tool: mortgages just got interesting.

Fishneedwater Commercial: ‘The year of the Fish!’

2015 Is the year of the fish! Fishneedwater are an innovative, successful residential agent, specialising in property marketing through on-line media, who are now bringing this expertise and energy to the commercial property sector.   Joining the team are Matthew Brooks and Susan Lamarque.   Matthew has 10 years experience as a surveyor with valuable expertise, and Susan has 15 years of Commercial Property Industry experience dealing with marketing commercial property and negotiating commercial leases and lease renewals.

Services include Investments, Disposals, Acquisitions, Surveys, Ground Rents and all aspects of Commercial leases.

Please call the team on 020 8432 1505

Sellers: ’tis the season!

The summer holiday sunburn is still peeling, the kids are only just getting back to school…and we’re about to tell you to start thinking about Christmas already?

It may feel like a long way off, but property buyers always have in their mind the dream of moving in time for the festive season – and maybe you do too, if you’re making a move yourself. That means that the period between the summer slowdown and the Christmas break is the ideal window to be listing a property for sale – especially this year, when the market is particularly favourable to sellers.

But the window isn’t a large one: even once you’ve accepted an offer, the legal process can easily take 8-12 weeks to rumble through to completion. So if you’re ready to sell, now’s the time to instruct an estate agent – but also to make sure your agent understands the importance of getting deals done quickly.

We’ve got a healthy impatient streak, so speed is baked into our process. We:

• Adopt a marketing and pricing strategy that attracts interest fast – rather than leave your property languishing on the market.
• Stoke up a sense of urgency and competition to get up to maximum bids as quickly as possible.
• Ensure that potential buyers have their mortgage offer in place (and favour cash buyers where appropriate) to avoid unexpected delays.
• Appoint a dedicated progression manager, who’ll be a solicitor’s worst nightmare but your best friend, to keep things moving.

So if you’re thinking about selling – or have a property on the market and you’re concerned about how long it’s taking – give us a call, or hit “reply” and we’ll get back to you. Quickly, of course.

Landlords: help your tenants settle in (easily)!

Even if you have a managing agent in place to take care of your buy-to-let properties, you might still want to consider providing a manual for new tenants – to help them settle into the property and the area, and to give them a good impression of their new, caring and helpful landlord!

What sort of information could the manual contain? Here’s a list of ideas to get you started:

The property:

• The days that the rubbish and recycling are collected
• The location of the utility meters and stopcock
• If there’s a special “knack” to opening a tricky lock
• Quick instructions on using the kitchen appliances (so that they don’t have to wade through instruction manuals)

The area:

• Bars and restaurants you love
• Interesting things to do locally
• Public transport options
• The best nearby supermarkets

If you’re unfamiliar with the area or property, ask your estate agent to help! We have heaps of knowledge about the locations in which we operate – and we ALWAYS swot up on the ins and outs of the properties on our books – so we’re in an ideal position to give you some pointers.

Once the manual is ready, it can be stored in a lever arch file inside the property. A nice touch is to provide some extra pages for the tenants to add their own information and tips – which can then be handed over to subsequent tenants.

Property news

The need-to-knows this month…

• UK property in bubble territory amid “delusional” bets on rent increases. According to a prominent property analyst, investors have been paying too much for property outside South East England – and there’s a risk that it could all come tumbling down.
• Towns the UK property boom forgot. Spend a moment being grateful that you didn’t buy a property in one of these places a decade ago. Unless you did, in which case…let’s move swiftly on!
• Need to find a “cheap” London flat? Beware the agents asking for upfront fees. A number of companies are now describing themselves as “relocation agents”, in order to get around a slew of rules and charge you a fee for making viewing appointments.
• Welcome to London’s new luxury hotspot. We won’t ruin the surprise. (You won’t need to sit down first: it’s not going to be that shocking.)

Our useful tool of the month

We don’t know about you, but mortgage calculations become a lot more fun when you can mess around with them inside an app.

Karl’s Mortgage Calculator has been around for a while, and it’s more than just fun: it’s genuinely useful.

By using the website or the app (Android only), you can:

• Calculate your mortgage payments quickly and easily
• Visualise results with easy-to-understand tables, graphs and charts
• Determine payments based on principal, interest, term, and payment amount
• Reverse-calculate your mortgage using any one variable
• Formulate early-payoff plans

Here’s a link to the website.

And if you have an Android phone, check out the app here.

The end! (Until next month.)

We’ll be back next month, but please do reply to this email if there’s anything you need any help with. Ideally property-related things, we hasten to add.

Speak to you soon!