The First Move

Guide

Welcome to The First Move

Hello, and welcome. Whether this is your first home in England or your fifth, what follows covers everything The First Move does, starting with your profile and your first listing and going as far as the exact arithmetic behind a suitability score.

The whole tool is built around one question. Once you actually own this place, what does life cost you each month? Not the asking price, which is the number everybody quotes, but the ongoing reality of a mortgage repayment with council tax on top, plus energy and water, plus broadband and everything else that keeps arriving whether you are ready for it or not. Most people end up piecing that together across a spreadsheet, a mortgage calculator and a dozen open listings. This brings it into one place, so you can compare properties on what they would genuinely cost you to live in.

If you are a first-time buyer still working out what you can afford, that is what this was built for. If you are further along and simply want a tidier way to keep track of what you are considering, it does that too. Pick a topic from the menu, or begin at getting started and work through in order.

Please read: what this tool does not cover

The First Move works out the ongoing monthly cost of owning a property, and it says nothing at all about the one-off cost of buying one. Stamp duty, solicitor and conveyancing fees, a survey, mortgage arrangement fees and the removal van are all real money, and none of them appear anywhere in your affordability score. Budget for them alongside the monthly figures here rather than assuming these numbers have already covered it.

England only. Council tax is set locally and works differently across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so properties outside England cannot be added.

Everything in the guide

18 pages, in the order we would read them.