Offering low on already reduced house

Funkygibbon

I've seen some houses around the £160,000 mark. These haven't been reduced but I'm still going in at about £140,000.

neas

Gotta go in low. we offered 155k on the 170k priced house to star with.

daisymay2008

neas wrote: »

Gotta go in low. we offered 155k on the 170k priced house to star with.

did you get the house? if so how much?

neas

daisymay2008 wrote: »

did you get the house? if so how much?

163k in the end. But we were being really cheeky because she had just dropped it from 175k after a buyer messed her around. You might get 10k off if you start 20k off.

Expect first offer to be rejected. Our 1st and 2nd were . Then we gave a sob story about how we mangled enough to squeeze her counter off of 165k to 163k.

neas

so basically we go half what the difference was on our initial offer. Offering too low tho will not get you taken seriously.

Funkygibbon

Going over £150,000 brings in the stamp duty on these particular properties. Will be using that as well as prices falling!

ExperiMentor

roboticpink wrote: »

sent another offer through today - estate agent got back straight away to say the house has sold in the last two days!

It's been on since JULY, it hardly seems possible that they have sold it in the last two days and I'm pretty upset she didn't think to tell us someone else had offered on it or was even interested.

Gutted.

Everyone complains about the Scottish system but here's another time when it works better. Once you've formally expressed interest in a property thay can't sell it without keeping you informed

harrup

roboticpink wrote: »

sent another offer through today - estate agent got back straight away to say the house has sold in the last two days!

It's been on since JULY, it hardly seems possible that they have sold it in the last two days and I'm pretty upset she didn't think to tell us someone else had offered on it or was even interested.

Gutted.

Gee, how dissapointing.

However.....all is not lost yet. I've lost track off the houses on rightmove or on EA sites who featured a SSTC sign only to reappear on the market a few months down the line as the sale fell through for one reason or another.

There is no way your house properly sold in a couple of days. At best the vendor accepted an offer....there hasn't been time to even do a survey!

Plus, if you truly, truly want it....you could always go in with a better, higher offer.

harrup

geoffky wrote: »

The market is dead on its feet.. first time buyers are the backbone of the housing market and they are not playing but waiting on the sidelines.

look at the posts from people with a few views in months and months..and the mortgage figures

Geoffky, could you please expand on this? I'm unclear as to why you think the health of the housing market is determined by FTB?

Why would that be?

thanks

PixieP

PixieP wrote: »

My partner and i are in a similar situation. We're first time buyers, and have been looking since early Jan. On Saturday we viewed a 3 bed, detached house which we both love. It ticks pretty much all the boxes - requires no work so we can move right in to.!

It’s on for £255k - having just dropped from £275k! However, I’ve done my homework.... in July 2007, at the peak of the property boom, a house opposite which is identical sold for £245k. So in the current market, with house prices having dropped during the recession, you would expect it to be worth about £235/£240kish (and there were two 4 bed houses that sold in 2006, which was still in the boom, for £250k). So that’s what we offered today - £235k, planning to go up to £240k max. Anything more and I really feel we’d be overpaying. They paid £215k for it in 2005 so they’re making money from it. Technially house prices are at a lower point than they were in 2005, so really they should be in negative equity. But I think they got it for a bargain in 2005, I think it should have been worth about £230k back then. It’s lucky that all the houses down the road are a similar size so comparison is quite easy. Some have 4 beds and a few have driveways (ours is 3 bed, no driveway), but you can see on the previous house sales that these go for slighltly more. But nothing has sold since this house opposite in July 2007, so it’s hard to gauge what they’re currently worth. But I think it’s reasonable to assume they’re worth slightly less than what they were going for in the peak.
!
So I called and offered this morning, it took ages for them to get back to me. Basically it was rejected (no real surprise) because they were hoping to get closer to the asking price, or at least £250k minimum. So I told them there’s no way we think it’s worth that and we certainly wouldn’t be offering that at all. He said that they said the house opposite that sold for £245k in 2007 was a bit of a do-er up-er (not sure if I believe that, am tempted to go round there, knock on the door and ask!) so it wasn’t necessarily a direct comparison. So I said we’d think about it, but that we’re in no real hurry as we can stay in our rented flat as long as we need. So I said I’d discuss it with My partner tonight and I might call them back tomorrow.

Then he called back an hour or so later and said that he thought we should know that they’ve found another property they’d like to buy (I had been told they’d already found a place, so I don’t know if this is a new one, or if all of this is total bull), but that this new property they like is actually a lot less than they thought they were gonna need to spend, so they might not be so reliant on getting the £250k anymore for their house. So I said that that was interesting, but in actual fact what they’re buying isn’t important, it’s the value of what they’re selling that’s key – why should I overpay on their house so they can buy something bigger?! (was getting a bit stroppy by now!!). He just said that he didn’t want to put us off totally by giving us the impression that they wouldn’t accept any lower than £250k.

So now we can up our offer. I just don’t know what to do... maybe go to £237k and see what they say, with the option of going further again if they reject it, or offering £240k and we want their range oven (cos that would be handy, because it’s one of those big ones) and their fridge-freezer too – and make it clear that this is our final offer, we won’t be budging and they can take it or leave it. Although we’d accept the £240k without the oven and freezer, but it’s something other than cash to do minor final negotiations on.

Any advice??

Although it's now months later, I thought I'd update this thread in case anyone reads it who is in a similar situation as we were.

After our final offer of £235k was rejected we just left it there - said we were still interested, but that we wouldn't be going any higher than that. That was in Feb this year. We carried on looking but didn't find anything we liked. Then in late April we got a call saying that they had found a house they wanted and that they wanted to have an offer secured on their house before they put an offer on this house (to give their offer more strength). So we went and had a second viewing, still loved it to bits, but decided that we were confident our last offer of £235k was fair, so said we were still very interested, but wouldn't be increasing it.

Again, they rejected this offer, but went ahead and put an offer on the house they wanted anyway, which was reject (for being too low - how's that for karma!).

Then about a month later we got a call saying they'd found another house they wanted, and were we still interested in the house (which we were). They put an offer on this house they wanted, it got accepted, so they in turn accepted our offer.

6 weeks later we were in!! It's our dream house - I love it so much. I'm so glad that we were patient and didn't bow to the pressure to increase our offer. We're very happy with what we paid - it was by no means a crazy bargain, but we're confident we won't be falling into negative equity any time soon.

So my advice - be patient. In the current market, the longer a house goes without being sold, the worse the situation is for the vendors. If they've rejected an offer early on, there's a good chance that they may come back to you later.