House Viewing: House of Why

Hello!

Well, I'm finally back with an update on our activities, and a report back from our latest house viewing. I'll start with the house viewing, because I know you all love the picturey bits the best ;)

House of Why (so named by Mattie, who is beautifully illustrating the source of this name in the picture to the right) is a 5 bedroom/3 reception room property round the corner from where we live now. It is cheap, very cheap. This explains why we went to see it.

The house is a reposession so it's on at a tempting price for it's size (around £115k), but sadly there is nothing tempting about it. Frankly, the only tempting thing is to walk around it saying "Why???" repetitively, which is just what we did. Subject to a fascinating variety of DIY projects over the years, it has fancy flush spotlights in places and serious structural issues in others. There are built-in DVD shelves and fixings for a large flat-screen TV in the same room as large amounts of homegrown fungus. I'm all for self-sufficiency but growing shrooms out of your walls is taking it a bit far.

Suffice to say that this may suit someone, but it isn't us. Another one to put down to experience then. Sad times.


General Updatery

Our final offer on Boat House was turned down and we don't feel inclined to go higher at the moment. It's such a tricky balancing act deciding what to offer, and when to walk away, and it's not something that any of us enjoy. On this occasion it's been a particularly hard decision to make, but we will find the right place in the end. True fact.

In other news, Mattie has decided to move on to pastures new. The precise location of these pastures is as yet unknown, but they look likely to be in the region of Leeds. This move may involve those notorious cattle-rustlers, Cornerstone, and it may not. It may also occur in March, but that is as yet unconfirmed.

Hang on: I seem to be suggesting that Mattie is a cow and that the largely vegan/vegetarian Cornerstone dwellers are cow-thieves. Step away from the metaphor, Hannah (however much I may think that Mattie would approve).

You get the gist though. We will soon be a co-op member down and this makes us all of the sad-but-supportive-of-peoples'-choices. What this means in terms of co-op numbers is also uncertain, but we will keep you posted.

In other, other news, the Localism Bill is now on the statute books, so we are safe and sound as regards the HMO legislation. Woop! That's a little something to cheer us on the long hunt for a home :) 

- Hannah

HMO Progress. Hmogress?

A small update on the campaign by Friendly Housing Action to fix the Housing Act and make it so that fully mutual co-ops don't need to have HMO licenses. Basically the good news is that the government has yet again admitted that co-ops should be exempt, and that it intends to fix the issue. They don't want to open up any unintentional loopholes in the law for other types of landlord/organisation though, so further advice is going to be sought about how to word it, etc. Although this doesn't mean the battle is over, as I imagine a tremendous number of small, yet important, things slip through the cracks at Westminster, it is a significant achievement and Friendly Housing Action deserve a massive round of applause for their work.

Full text from Hansard*:

"Andrew Stunell: My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr
Leech) has tabled new clause 26, which relates to a specific situation for
fully mutual housing co-operatives. By a quirk of the legislation, they are
caught by the houses in multiple occupation requirement for licensing and,
sometimes, planning permission. The Department has been lobbied by the
Friendly Housing Action campaign group to secure an exemption for fully
mutual housing co-operatives, and I am very sympathetic to the campaign, as
such organisations were never intended to be caught by the licensing
provisions.

We have to be careful to ensure that in granting an exemption we do not
inadvertently allow other categories to slip through the loophole, so I am
asking for further advice on how we might achieve that. I hope to return to
the issue at a later stage, so I hope that my hon. Friends will not feel the
need to press new clause 26 to a Division. "

This is a signifiant step forward for the campaign. However, we now need to
carefully manage the passage of the amendment through the Lords. We should
probably hold a meeting during the next gathering to work through this.

* I'm hoping to get a video of this glorious moment, which I will embed as soon as I have it.

Moulder and Wiser

Dear readers, I am gutted to let you know that we have had to abandon the quest for Mould Mansion.

I can't pretend this is a post I'm pleased to write, but I will be doing my best to focus on the positive. Frankly, there's nothing else for it. After the most frenetic period of activity in the year long history of Golem Housing Co-op, we had a meeting last night to formally agree that we could not realistically go to the auction for Mould Mansion. The mood was curiously upbeat, which I suspect was mostly down to the relief of finally knowing something for certain after so many weeks of uncertainty. It's just a shame that the certainty was that we are likely to remain an un-housed co-op for some time.

To re-cap, Sven spotted the magnificent mouldering edifice that is MM on Rightmove some while back. Some of us were keen, others less so. Why was the start price so low? Did we really want to deal with the vagaries of the auction process? Could we possibly ever afford such a large house? A viewing was arranged for those of us keen to have a closer look, and we duly saw that though undeniably mouldy, it was (spacially, at the very least) the perfect house for us.

Excitement set in and a second viewing was arranged. Could we, dare we go for it? More viewings and more discussion led to the unavoidable conclusion that we had to try, and so off we embarked on the incredible rigmarole that is attempting to buy a house.

And this is where the process defeated us, for at the end of the day, for all of our enthusiasm and determination, we cannot manufacture time. Quotes take time, valuations and surveys take time, finding investors takes time, and fitting all of these things into a workable business plan which gets approved by mortgage companies all takes precious time, which, in the end, we did not have. With a normal house sale there would be time to do these things consecutively, but with the auction deadline looming, we were forced to do them all at once.

Clearly, this approach did not work, but I feel proud that we tried, and amazed at how much we have learned in so short a time.

Focusing on the positive, (which I promised I would do), we all now have a clearer idea of the complexities of the house-buying process, and it's pitfalls. We have built relationships with surveyors, builders and trades people of all sorts, solicitors, guarantors and investors which will stand us in great stead when we next see a suitable property. We have all learnt that we can push ourselves to get things done to tight deadlines, have three meetings a week and not go mad (even when two golems are at work on dissertations). On a personal level, I have learnt more about damp and insulation than I, for one, ever expected to know. I can give you a rundown of energy-saving home improvements by cost and effectiveness in a way that the geek in me is unspeakably proud of.

Most importantly, we are all still friends. We still eat together. We still fill our meetings with innuendo. We still make pots of tea and hold babies for each other when needed, and we still want to continue in the unpredictably emotional process of buying a house together, which is surely the most positive thing of all.


Onwise and Upwise

To fend off dejection and ensure that our collective thoughts remained focussed on finding a house in which we all shall live, those non-dissertationing golems amongst us will be turning our energies towards one of the major stumbling blocks we face as a co-op: The Housing Act 2004. This mighty embuggerance legislates for Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). It's meant to protect tenants from unscrupulous absentee landlords, sub-standard and dangerous living conditions, and other such perils of rented accomodation.

For this, we applaud it. But our applause ends abruptly when we consider that it also applies to housing co-ops. As a co-op you are both tenant and landlord, and as such, mightily unlikely to keep yourself in sub-standard living conditions. Not only this, but certain characters at Westminster have openly admitted that housing co-ops were never meant to be included in this law. Indeed, there was meant to be an exemption for them, but somehow it got forgotten. A minor oops in bureaucratic terms rendered many co-ops illegal overnight, and the co-op movement has been trying to get this situation rectified ever since.

Some golems have already been lending their weight to a campaign by Friendly Housing Action to get an amendment made to the Housing Act, and in the pursuit of a home to call our own, we will now be working on ways to persuade Swansea Council to clarify the situation in our local area. If you're interested in the issue and want to help out, then do get in touch.

Hannah