where else can i look for a house

54druids

accepted an offer last Monday on my house and they want entry in 6 weeks ahhhh!. Trouble is cannot find a house that we like and there seems to a real shortage of houses. We are porting our mortgage so if we don't find a property within 3 months we will face hefty redemption fees. I have looked on primelocation, rightmove and GSPC as well as checking ES in the areas we are interested in. Is there anywhere else to look as getting pretty desperate. Also if anyone knows the Scottish Market, can you offer under an offers over price?

Running_Horse

Don't know the Scottish market, but if you are in a serious hurry then I doubt offering under when it states offers over will get you what you want. My father in law was recently in a similar situation, and for the first time in his life had to pay near full asking price to get the only decent house in the area, when his had just sold. Have you tried driving round your favourite area looking for EA boards? Or if you can focus on a particular road then how about a leaflet drop?

googler

The change of agent worked for you, then!

Assuming you want to stay in Scotland....

Portals; s1homes, primelocation, rightmove

Agents & their networks: RE/MAX (remax-scotland.com), Your Move (yourmove.co.uk), Rettie (rettie.co.uk), Savill, Knight Frank, Strutt & Parker, GSPC, ESPC and other SPCs. There's also Smiths Gore, CKD Galbraith, and occasionally you find surveyors who have property for sale.

Where do you want to be? Try googling "for sale nnnnnn" or "house for sale nnnnnn" or "property for sale nnnnnn "where nnnnnn is your target street, village, town, or county. That sometimes finds the ones that fell through the cracks between the major players.

You can offer anything you want, on any style of asking price, but you're only likely to succeed in offering below the offers over asking price if the property has been on the market for a while (most of the 'Offers Over' properties have, since with Home Reports in place, the majority of agents are placing properties on market for Offers Around or Offers in Region of ....)

54druids

oh boy did the change of agent work googler. 2 viewings in 2 weeks and an offer. Of course it could just have been luck. The house I have my eye on has already reduced it's price which could either mean they really need to sell and will consider anything or that's it and they won't accept any lower. Going to see a property on Wednesday and the seller has the property on the market for 25k less that the hip value but apparently wants over that value. It equates to over 10% more than the O/O price which I would have thought was a tad unreasonable in this climate don't you? There is another one which I would have to offer 20-25k under the fixed asking price to fit in with my budget. Do you think it is worth a go. Shy bairns get nowt and all that.

Bean_Counter

54druids wrote: »

Also if anyone knows the Scottish Market, can you offer under an offers over price?

I would have thought that someone going overs offer would NOT be a distressed seller or someone looking for a quick sale as they would go fixed price or this 'offers in the region of' that seems popular at the moment.

No harm in offering, but in my experience (moved four weeks ago) I would doubt they would accept.

zzzLazyDaisy

This happened to me during the last property crash.

Put the house on the market, but didn't look for anywhere else as properties were taking 12 months and more to sell. As luck would have it, the same weekend we got an offer near the asking price from a lady who had family at the back of us and was wanting to move back into the area - but she needed to be out of her own place within 6 weeks!

So we phoned every estate agent in the area we wanted to be, plus a 10 mile radius around, and asked them to send us the details of ONLY empty properties. (The problem was, every occupied house we looked at was the same story 'oh we haven't even started looking yet...').

We then spent several days going round the available houses. In fact the one we bought wasn't even on the list - we saw the EA putting the for sale board up as we drove past, it turned out to be a repo, and within 6 weeks we were in!

That's one thing about Rightmove etc - it can take two or three weeks from initial instruction to actually getting the particulars approved and onto the website, so there is a window of opportunity there if you do the leg work and keep in touch with the EA's.

Good luck!

googler

54druids wrote: »

oh boy did the change of agent work googler. 2 viewings in 2 weeks and an offer. Of course it could just have been luck.

...and the folks who put the offer in are from England....?

keith969

54druids wrote: »

There is another one which I would have to offer 20-25k under the fixed asking price to fit in with my budget. Do you think it is worth a go. Shy bairns get nowt and all that.

Definitely give it a try, nothing ventured nothing gained as they say. Start very low and try and split the difference!

54druids

googler wrote: »

...and the folks who put the offer in are from England....?

Of course! Ooh I do love to be proved right!:T

54druids

so if an offer has been reduced do you think they are after a quick sale?

PasturesNew

Glad to hear a change of agent worked. Are there different agents approaching different markets? What I mean is that where I used to live some agents actively targetted wealthy Londoners to tempt them into buying houses as holiday homes in the area. Maybe your new agent is tapped into a different market, or covers a different town the other one didn't.

Here's a list of agents to look through: http://hubpages.com/hub/Buying-a-House-in-Scotland-Essential-Websites