‘We were nervous doer-uppers — here’s what we wish we had known’

Watson says: “We are seeing 80 per cent of buyers start their search not wanting to do any work. Six months or so later the majority are happy to do work, as by then they realise it allows them to get a better house and generally have more choice.

“They will also see how limited supply is for a refurbished house. Construction costs have stabilised, and the uncertainty of how long it takes to get materials is a lot less of an issue now.”

Taking on a property in need of repair, especially when the buyer has never embarked on a renovation, can still be a scary prospect. So here is some practical advice from experts and first-time fixer-uppers who share what they wish they had known from the outset.

First-time fixer-upper No 1: Oliver Codrington

If Oliver Codrington, a 44-year-old barrister and financial adviser, could give one piece of advice to first-time fixer-uppers like himself, it would be to take as much time as they need to consider all the options.

In 2021 he bought his dream family home, a 3,200 sq ft detached house built in the 1960s, in Cherwell, Oxfordshire, to live in with his wife, Joanna, who is a doctor, and their two children.

He stretched himself to get a £525,000 mortgage and borrowed money from family and friends to refurbish it. However, a series of unfortunate events meant that he ran over budget and borrowed £90,000 on credit cards to cover the shortfall.

The house was in far worse shape than he thought. Snap decisions came back to haunt him, such as the electric combi boiler that turned out to be prohibitively expensive to run and not putting enough money aside for exterior works.

He says: “You know that kitchen and bathrooms are going to cost, but there’s quite a lot of competition for your business for those.

“When you go outside, it’s a sellers’ market — if you’re selling labour. Finding people who were good enough to render this house with availability during the summer months was like pulling hen’s teeth.”

Some setbacks could not have been avoided. The Suez Canal closed halfway through the build, which sent the cost of timber and plasterboard soaring, and he had to hire another tiler because his first one disappeared after realising he had put the tiles on upside down.

Codrington says: “We got to the stage where we couldn’t finish the work, but we were past the point of no return. Once you take the roof off something you’ve devalued it so much that you have to finish it in order to even recoup what you spent on it, let alone clear the mortgage.”

He reapproached his bank, but he was on a low 1.4 per cent interest mortgage rate so it was unable to offer a further advance at a higher rate or remortgage to consolidate the unsecured debt, leaving him trapped.

He turned to his broker, Central Loans, and found the specialist lender Together, which lent him a £250,000 second-charge loan on a two-year fixed rate to finish the works.

Codrington says: “At that stage what you want is a product and a lender that understands that position. They charge for it, it’s a healthy interest rate, but it’s far preferable to credit cards and we couldn’t have borrowed that amount of money any other way.

“It got the house to the point where we could sell it if I needed to. To anyone that runs into problems, I’d say they should open their minds to other solutions.”

Now the property is worth £1.3 million thanks to the new roof, solar panels, batteries, vaulted ceilings and a remodelled interior complete with new wiring and replastered walls.

First time fixer-upper No 2: Rob Smyth

“There’s no way we could have afforded what we have now four years ago, but we desperately wanted a whole house, not a flat,” says Rob Smyth, 41, who works in sponsorship sales.

In 2019 he was looking for a family home in central London with his pregnant wife, Sarah, who is a lawyer, and their dog, Maggie.

When he came upon the mid-terrace period townhouse in Rees Street, Islington, north London, whole sections were derelict because the woman who owned it for 50 years was elderly and living on one floor.

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Smyth says: “There was a commode in the bedroom and you couldn’t even open the back door to get out to the garden, which was so overgrown that you couldn’t see to the end of it.”

They could see the house had potential, though, so they borrowed money from their parents to add to their savings, negotiated money off the asking price and bought the house for £1.09 million.

They had never renovated a house before, but a property on the same terrace was being restored so they asked the builders if they could look round it to see what was possible. They asked a friend who was an architect to help with drawing up plans and applying for planning permission, then ran a tender for a building contractor once they had approval.

Smyth says: “We went with gut feeling in the end; we invited them over and just chose them because we liked them.”

He spent nine months doing minor repairs and painting, then lived on the to floor for two and a half months while the building work was carried out below. “We were left to our own devices and had to answer questions being asked from the contractor. If we were doing it again, we’d spend a bit more on an architect who could be on site as that will ultimately save you money in the long run,” he says.

They took advice from their builder along the way, including replacing storage with a window to let light into the stairwell.

“That’s now the thing we get the most amount of comments about when people come over,” Smyth says. “You need to know where not to be tight because it will save you money and add value to the property in the long run. My wife insisted it would be worth spending in the kitchen and bathrooms.”

The Smyths splashed out on a designer Tom Howley kitchen and employed a joiner to create bespoke cabinetry as well as adding a mansard roof extension and an orangery that flows onto the garden.

Two more children later, they are ready to move to greener pastures, but the value of the house has almost doubled. It’s now on sale for £1.95 million with the estate agency Strutt & Parker.

Hugh Ball, the director of its Islington office, says: “The owners made sure to incorporate a fourth bedroom by creating a fantastic principal suite; something not always possible due to local planning and conservation constraints.

“This addition added a scarcity value to the house, setting it apart from the three-bedroom homes on the same street.”

The property developer: Saif Derzi

Saif Derzi, the owner of SDGB Properties, has been fixing up properties for more than a decade. At the age of 32, he has a portfolio of 110 refurbished properties that he sells and lets out as affordable housing.

Derzi works from the outside in, first determining whether the essential structure of the property — the walls, the foundation, the roof and the windows — is sound.

Nasty surprises, like subsidence, Japanese knotweed, woodworm or dry rot, are likely to make the property difficult to mortgage and insure. He is also suspicious of postwar concrete properties for the same reason.

If the bones are good then it’s time to look inwards. “If I was fixing up a property for the first time I would look for easy wins: things like kitchens and bathrooms that need replacing, straightforward flooring, painting, decorating and new carpets,” he says.

When working out a renovation budget he searches property portals for sold prices over the past two to three years for comparable properties — roughly the same size and age, with the same number of bedrooms — within a quarter of a mile, then he calculates the mean average sold price.

Derzi tends not to invest in properties where he needs to spend more than 20 per cent of the value to bring it up to the average sold price for a similar property in that area.

“Sometimes you find a unique property that you just can’t find a comparable one for. You can’t be looking at pricing for a grade II listed cottage, for example, in an area where there aren’t a lot of them. You’ve just got to go with your gut feeling sometimes.”

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When it comes to dealing with builders and decorators, be specific and clear about your expectations, down to how many coats of paint you’d like on the wall. Derzi comes up with a schedule of works and a payment plan so the workmen get paid on completion of each stage of the renovation.

“If you’re upfront about what you want and you detail how and when you will pay them then builders are great to work with. If I’d known this in the early days things would have been much easier for me,” he says.

Investors in property will negotiate a discount with the seller that corresponds with how much they will spend on work to make sure they are adding as much value as possible. If this isn’t possible, Derzi thinks it’s still worth buying a fixer-upper if it’s a property you see yourself living in for a long time.

He says: “You could be spending that money on holidays, but I’d rather spend it on my house. It’s going to add value to my day-to-day life because I’m living there.”

The architect: Tim Tasker

Timothy Tasker Architects has overseen more than 100 renovation projects in London and the Cotswolds. Tasker says that when looking for properties to fix up, Victorian houses are popular because they are much more flexible than postwar housing and modern homes because you can easily open them up at the back to create an open-plan layout.

This can be costly because extensions often have to be reinforced with steelwork, and, post-Grenfell, tightened fire restrictions mean you have to have a door in between the kitchen and the hallway so the occupants can use the latter to escape if they are in the bedrooms upstairs when a fire breaks out.

To create a truly open-plan entrance with a bespoke staircase you would have to install a sprinkler or mist system. A cheaper option is a “fire curtain”, which is a screen that drops down from the ceiling to separate the kitchen from the escape route.

Listed properties can come with strict planning rules attached that make replacing single glazed windows and putting in insulation extremely expensive or even impossible. Without such restrictions replacing all the windows in a four-bedroom Victorian house will cost between £25,000 to £40,000, Tasker says, depending on the quality.

Aesthetically, refurbishment options also depend on the age of what you’re buying. Tasker says. “The big thing with late-Victorian buildings is contrasting the modern with the old so you can have the slick slimline glazing out back, knock it about a bit there, and retain the period features and fireplaces to the more formal rooms at the front of the house.

“Nineteenth-century homes might have Arts and Crafts stuff that can be celebrated and enhanced, but once you get into the 1930s you can redo everything in a modern style quite easily.”

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A WC under the stairs is the most common plumbing addition Tasker is asked for, but he warns that there needs to be a minimum width of 180 millimetres to achieve this.

Boutique hotels have seduced many buyers into a fantasy of having a bedroom suite with a freestanding bathtub — again, it’s not as simple as it looks. He says, “If you imagine a bath full of water, with the weight of a person, it weighs as much as a car, so you have to double up the joist and sips and plywood on top of the roof of the room below; it’s really embarrassing to have a bath fall through it.”

A detailed schedule of work, with building regulations and planning restrictions taken into account, is essential to ensure a smooth renovation. Tasker says: “The only way to understand what you’re buying from a builder is to have a really detailed set of information: schedules, specifications, detailed drawings. If you give a builder a set of planning drawings of structure information, they probably couldn’t even give you 60 per cent cost certainty.

“Give them a really big set of information and say, ‘Give me a fixed price to deliver this,’ and it will be much more accurate and the client is more protected because they understand exactly what they are entering into.”

The lender: Glenhawk

Homeowners usually use personal savings to finance renovations, but investors are far more likely to explore short-term financing options. Jamie Pritchard, a managing sales director at the specialist lender Glenhawk, estimates that only 10 per cent of its customers are owner-occupiers and the rest are buy-to-let landlords.

He likes to call the bridging loans it offers “transitional finance”. He says homeowners “are usually bringing myths of short-term finance that it’s really expensive, but the market has grown up a lot in the last few years”.

A high street lender generally would not offer a loan for a derelict property or one that was bought at auction, but a specialist lender would, Pritchard says. Its underwriters would draw the line at a property with severe structural problems like subsidence, however.

Buyers should talk to brokers before they even start looking on property portals so they have a realistic idea of the finance available to them. The average loan amount that Glenhawk provides for a residential property is £500,000 on a typical interest rate of 0.7 to 0.94 per cent (because the loan-to-value is lower than for a traditional mortgage), but buyers can borrow up to 75 per cent of the property’s value.

Renovators will need to keep a close eye on timescales, though, because most of these loans are fixed for 12 months, then charges can be incurred for late repayment. There is, however, no exit or early repayment fee.

Pritchard says: “I think people got very used to remortgaging because they got comfortable in a low-interest rate environment, but now people are having to look at other options.

“It’s a good way of climbing up the property ladder as well if you’ve already got a nice home, but it’s too small and you can’t quite afford the leap to a bigger property that’s turnkey, but you can afford a bigger property that needs some work.”

The most common scenario Pritchard sees is homeowners borrowing for three to four-month periods to rip out threadbare kitchens and avocado bathroom suites or put in home offices and garden rooms.

Downsizers also find short-term finance helpful — they can buy the property they want to move to, do it up in the 12-month period in which they are selling their present home, then once their new home has been finished, move into it mortgage-free.

However, buyers should be aware that they may need to pay more for a specialist broker that deals with renovation finance as well as mortgages, and a specialist lawyer for the conveyancing.

Pritchard says: “I tell people that when they are looking online, they should look for the properties that don’t have many photos because they often aren’t as bad as you imagine they are.”