We fell in love… with our house!
This February, Bon and Araidne Meredith are celebrating the new love in their lives – their new home at Parklands in Earley.
The sisters, who have lived for many years in Reading, decided last year that the time had come to relocate their father from Scotland and consolidate their living arrangements. It was a decision which would require both women to sell up their two bedroom Victorian terrace houses and seek one new property with four decent sized bedrooms, which they could all happily co-exist in together.
“It is extraordinarily difficult to find a four bedroom home where each of bedrooms shares good proportions” says Bon. “All the period homes we looked at that were available for sale at the time seemed to offer two very good sized bedrooms but often with the other two bedrooms lacking in size. Given the search criteria for our unconventional circumstances, this made them completely unsuitable and steered us towards looking at what was available in the new home market.”
Their search led the sister’s not terribly far away – only 10 minutes down the road to the newly constructed Parklands development in East Reading close to Woodley and Earley. “This is the area where we concentrated our search” says Bon. “We have lived in Reading for many years and we know where we want to be. My work as an IT consultant requires me to travel on a fairly frequent basis and I wanted to retain quick and easy access to the excellent rail network at Reading station which being located this side of Reading allows. My sister, by contrast, works for the NHS and fairly locally but her job also requires travel to different destinations throughout Berkshire and the South, so it was also important for her to be in an area where she could access the road network easily. Parklands ticked all the boxes in terms of this criteria.”
Rather ironically it was the first house that Bon and Araidne visited at Parklands which they fell in love with but the property went under offer to another purchaser in the first instance. Having lost out, the sister’s started looking around. “Nothing else that we viewed at that time came close in measuring up to our preferred Parklands property” says Bon “either in terms of quality of build or of accommodation on offer.”
This meant that when Bon received a call from Bewley to say the original party had dropped out of the purchase, she and Araidne made the decision to act as quickly as possible. Bewley Homes were offering full market part exchange – something both of us were quite sceptical about, having heard anecdotally that you tend to be offered less than a fair market price. Having very recently sold my own property which was almost identical to my sister’s and situated just around the corner, I had a fairly good idea of values and also the amount of time and effort it takes to successfully market and sell a home. My sister and I were both very pleasantly surprised at what a positive experience part-exchange through Bewley Homes was. The entire process was really quick and slick and took the headache out of house moving process enabling us move more or less straight away and with very little hassle into our gorgeous new home.
“The company Bewley appoints to undertake the Part-Exchange selected the estate agents and arranged for them to visit and value on the same day which made the process non-invasive and the price offered really was a fair reflection of the market value. It is certainly worth considering if you are thinking of upsizing.
“Since moving here, our lives have changed so much for the better. This house has been thoughtfully planned and laid out to accommodate modern day living. We can entertain easily and there is enough room for guests to stay over. We are able to park our car right outside our front door – something we were never able to do at our previous homes where the parking on offer was on-road. Everything to date about living at Parklands has been fantastic – the house works well for our needs and has such a warm and welcoming feel about it and we have joined a diverse and friendly community – in short, we are completely in love.”