To those selling in these difficult times Part Deux. AKA sellers support network!

tyllwyd

JenE - ultimately it is your decision what to market the house at. But in most areas the market is very slow at the moment, so if you think your house is going to be quite difficult to sell and you want to sell as soon as you can, it seems crazy to start marketing it at a price above what you feel it is worth. If you like that EA best, then no reason not to go with them but at the price you prefer. The EA would probably be happier with that lower price anyway, if truth be told.


I'm getting very discouraged - we lowered our price a few weeks ago because the market seems to have dropped, and the statistics the EA give us look very healthy - well above the average for the branch - but only one viewer since the price went down. Things are just slower than a slow thing on a slow day around here. I'm getting fed up, we love this house but we need to move somewhere cheaper, and if we don't move we want to swap things around so make the small bedroom a study etc, but don't want to do that while the house is on the market because it looks more marketable as it is. I just can't see anything much happening until September now.

gemima

Hi,
I am new to this thread but can I join you?
We have not long put our house on the market and under normal circumstances it should have gone under offer fairly quickly (well it did in 2008 when the market was bad but we couldn't find anywhere back then so didn't move). We have had only 2 viewings in 2 weeks and no offers. So, the market is is worse than 2008 around here.
The market here has gone from fairly OK to nothing selling at all within a 10 mile radius in the last 14 days. We have found somewhere and are happy to drop ours to the point where it is a bargain but only if the other property will come down too. I would love to see house prices in this area go down - its way too high for the average person to afford.

The problem is I don't know if its just the time of year and even if we did drop our price, would there still be no interest?

I don't want our house to be one of those 'sticking' - I would rather go all out and drop the price fairly soon and then we will know for sure!

Hope some of you get some offers soon x

bobbadog

We've been waiting all week for a lady who'd had two viewings to arrange a third with her Dad - she rang the estate agent this morning and said her Dad wasn't going to let her view or make an offer or anything on ours, as we're a downstairs flat and bound to have rising damp (?!) - Her loss!

HAd a viewing saturday and they've arranged a 2nd viewing for this coming Friday - fingers crossed

NEH

gemima wrote: »

Hi,
I am new to this thread but can I join you?
We have not long put our house on the market and under normal circumstances it should have gone under offer fairly quickly (well it did in 2008 when the market was bad but we couldn't find anywhere back then so didn't move). We have had only 2 viewings in 2 weeks and no offers. So, the market is is worse than 2008 around here.
The market here has gone from fairly OK to nothing selling at all within a 10 mile radius in the last 14 days. We have found somewhere and are happy to drop ours to the point where it is a bargain but only if the other property will come down too. I would love to see house prices in this area go down - its way too high for the average person to afford.

The problem is I don't know if its just the time of year and even if we did drop our price, would there still be no interest?

I don't want our house to be one of those 'sticking' - I would rather go all out and drop the price fairly soon and then we will know for sure!

Hope some of you get some offers soon x

To be honest, 2 weeks is nothing in this current market. I think you have to be prepared to wait as things are very slow at the moment. In our area, flats aren't selling as there isn't any FTB and therefore it's causing the people in the middle range houses to become stuck as well....The only places that seem to be selling are the top end houses...

gemima

NEH wrote: »

To be honest, 2 weeks is nothing in this current market. I think you have to be prepared to wait as things are very slow at the moment. In our area, flats aren't selling as there isn't any FTB and therefore it's causing the people in the middle range houses to become stuck as well....The only places that seem to be selling are the top end houses...

Thanks, yes I know 2 weeks is nothing but a month ago if a house was realistically priced it went under offer quickly. I think what I am saying is - is it slow because houses are so over priced/valued or just slow because of the time of year - anyone else had experience of putting their house on the market in July in years gone by ie. in the boom years were July/August still slow? We have the added problem around here of there being alot of public sector workers so I guess this could be an issue too. Oh well, as nothing is selling we don't have to worry about the hosue we like going yet.....

NEH

gemima wrote: »

Thanks, yes I know 2 weeks is nothing but a month ago if a house was realistically priced it went under offer quickly. I think what I am saying is - is it slow because houses are so over priced/valued or just slow because of the time of year - anyone else had experience of putting their house on the market in July in years gone by ie. in the boom years were July/August still slow? We have the added problem around here of there being alot of public sector workers so I guess this could be an issue too. Oh well, as nothing is selling we don't have to worry about the hosue we like going yet.....

You must be in a very lucky area or an area in demand as most people's houses haven't gone in under a month for a lot of us on here....and no most people ahve the sense to look at ladn regsitry data and make their own minds up about which valuation the Solicitor or estate agent suggests....We had 3 valuations and then checked the land regsitry data and sites such as nethouse prices or ourproperty.com and then reached a resonable value from that...

Be careful if you do drop the price as a number of people using rightmove will use something called Propertybee or something simliar and will be able to see all the price drops and changes that are made. If we notice people dropping more than once then we would know they are desperate to sell and put a cheeky offer in..

gemima

We use property bee as well. To be honest I would be glad to see the house prices drop in this area and all 3 estate agents came up with the same valuation. We have been watching the market for the last 2.5 years and it did slump but now back to what it was again (doesn't make sense). We are not desperate just stupidly saw something we liked before selling ours but then it happened the other way round last time which is why we looked before selling this time - typical the market has stopped!
Thanks for your reply. I will keep updating if we get any more viewings.

tyllwyd

gemima wrote: »

Thanks, yes I know 2 weeks is nothing but a month ago if a house was realistically priced it went under offer quickly. I think what I am saying is - is it slow because houses are so over priced/valued or just slow because of the time of year - anyone else had experience of putting their house on the market in July in years gone by ie. in the boom years were July/August still slow? We have the added problem around here of there being alot of public sector workers so I guess this could be an issue too. Oh well, as nothing is selling we don't have to worry about the hosue we like going yet.....

I think the majority of the posters in this thread would say that there are very few proceedable buyers out there so that chains just aren't getting going (if you want to discuss whether this is because houses are overpriced then I'd start a new thread for that - but be warned, it is a case of light the blue touch paper and stand well back!!)

Have a look at the house prices report for your area on home.co.uk - they have statistics for average time on market, number of houses sold etc which will help give you a picture of what things are like at the moment.

Chiaroscuro

gemima wrote: »

We use property bee as well. To be honest I would be glad to see the house prices drop in this area and all 3 estate agents came up with the same valuation. We have been watching the market for the last 2.5 years and it did slump but now back to what it was again (doesn't make sense). We are not desperate just stupidly saw something we liked before selling ours but then it happened the other way round last time which is why we looked before selling this time - typical the market has stopped!
Thanks for your reply. I will keep updating if we get any more viewings.

Ha, we've done that too.

The vendor showed us around herself and said she'd like to sell to us - she was on the market a couple of years ago but withdrew because of a health scare. She's a really sweet lady and it's a lovely house but we're still wating for our first viewer.

I'm not sure whether to chase the estate agent or not or if I'm just being unrealistic when it's only been on a couple of weeks.

tyllwyd wrote: »

I think the majority of the posters in this thread would say that there are very few proceedable buyers out there so that chains just aren't getting going (if you want to discuss whether this is because houses are overpriced then I'd start a new thread for that - but be warned, it is a case of light the blue touch paper and stand well back!!)

Have a look at the house prices report for your area on home.co.uk - they have statistics for average time on market, number of houses sold etc which will help give you a picture of what things are like at the moment.

Thanks for that recommendation, that's useful

Malystryx

Got a call from the sol and everything is proceeding well. Sol asked all the usual questions about the flat and everything that was included with the sale ie curtains, flooring etc. Think our sol will work very quickly for us as he is a family friend so we are very lucky in that respect. For anyone out there who is having problems with their sol being too slow just keep hassling them. They'll soon get fed up and get the ball rolling a bit faster.

As for our new property we can pick up the keys on 3rd August :beer:

It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN........:T