Spare the cost of moving, buy next door

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by Kay Murchie

If you are lacking in space then expanding your home sideways or upwards is a popular approach but a new trend is to purchase the house next door and knock two properties into one. This may ease the stresses and costs associated with moving but this doesn’t mean that your joint property is double the value.

This is a common method so that people don’t have to move out of the area and they don’t have to move their children to another school so they expand and stay for another decade so that the market will give a profit.

One example is a family of five in a small terraced house, larger properties in the area were selling for around £600,000. The house next door went up for sale at £380,000 so they purchased it and knocked the two into one. The front of the houses stay the same but they now have 6 double bedrooms instead of three. £11,000 was spent on legal fees and stamp duty and a further £56,000 on renovation, loft conversions and redecoration. Purchasing next door cost significantly less than selling up and buying in a more expensive area.

Should they wish to sell in the future and turn the one house back into two, walls would simply have to be built between the ground floor dining areas and the two front bedrooms.