The 15 Corby homes going to auction for under £100k as troubled HMO firm offloads its stock

It’s only an hour on the train from London, has a wonderful, close community, a modern town centre, fantastic schools, beautiful public forests and an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

But you can still get a bargain home in Corby.

A glut of homes at the cheaper end of the scale have come onto the market in the town. They’re being sold by a troubled property development company called Home Holdings, part of Home Reit PLC, of which one of the directors is political journalist Peter Cardwell.

The firm was part of a group set up to provide housing for homeless people, but it has since run into trouble after allegedly inflating the value of its stock, and is now looking to offload some of its portfolio.

This paper sounded the alarm more than two years ago over large London property firms buying up housing in Corby to turn into HMOs, artificially inflating house prices for local families.

The Corby houses will go to auction with Allsop next month. Most of them have open viewing days coming up.

Several are in parts of Corby where an Article 4 direction was imposed last month making it much more difficult for landlords to create HMOs out of family homes.

Because of the way they are sold, the guide price for auctioned properties is often lower than the going rate, and there’s lots of opportunity to get a few thousand off what you’d normally pay for a house. Some of them need significant work to make them habitable.

But if you’re buying at auction, remember to set your price and don’t get carried away because you’ll have to have the money upfront to pay for the home. Guide prices are just that – the properties can end up costing a lot more than the initial estimate.

And also – don’t forget to read the legal pack to check for any hidden nasties.

You can see all the lots on Allsop’s website.