What to offer when priced as £xxxK - £xxxK?

Loopgames

Angelicdevil wrote: »

The property I ended up buying had a price range. I offered below the lower end of their range and got my home

Sounds about right. Well done.

Mr_Thrifty

G_M wrote: »

I would offer £xxxK.

Hee hee hee :rotfl: :beer:

AMO

1) Go to Zoopla and if the estate agent has registered the property with this site it will show when the property was put on the market and how many times it has been reduced.

2) Also on Zoopla you can check when it was last sold and how much.

3) Also on Zoopla, you can check how much houses on that road have sold in the past (this doesn't actually tell you much, but if you are for example bidding on the most expensive house on the street and there are lots of recent transactions for similar sized houses and the price is way above the market cap for that street, have a think as to why that might be).

4) As other people have mentioned, when coming across a range of prices, the lowest of the range is the highest you'd ever want to pay.

In general, you should look at a lot of houses to make sure you've got good value and then start bidding. You expect to get rejections especially if others have bid higher, but you have to go through this 'ceremony' - otherwise you'll just end up overpaying.

Houses that don't need anything doing to them are ones that sell the fastest so if after looking round it ticks most of the boxes, then offer £220K > £225K > £228K and then take it from there. Don't take the pi$$ too much if its a reasonable price after comparing.

To give you an example, the house we're buying is over £300K, but we're fairly close to the asking price as its nicely decorated and gives good value for our money in terms of inside space.

However, we have seen houses priced at £295K which we offered £250K for. Sounds like a pi$$ take, but we were serious. Essentially the owners were looking at their own property through rose tinted glasses. They were saying that their house was in a very desirable Redrow development and near the railway station etc etc etc. If you think about it, whilst it might be nice as a young worker to be near a railway station, hearing the train going by every 10 minutes isn't really an advantage if you do take the train. Furthermore, when we tried to assess how much Redrow would sell those properties today if newly built, they would only be another £10-15K more. So given the amount of work needing to be done in a property that's been lived in for 15 years, it really wasn't worth it. There are loads of places that try to sell high based on 'being the best street to live on in this town 10 years ago' etc. Things change. Don't fall for it.

In essense, use your judgement. The house sounds like its well looked after making it desirable to today's house hunters that are less willing than the previous generation of doing houses up. So if its only on the market recently and has interest, you need to bid a tad closer.

Hope that helps.

londonlydia

Thanks for all the advice.

Well decided to make me 'cheeky offer' of 220k. Which got shot straight down by the EA saying that a higher offer had already been rejected. He said the offer was 235k. So I asked if he could put the offer in anyway which he proceeded to say it will be rejected and his instructions from the Vendor was to reject anything below 235k!!! Am I being fed BS? Tempted to pop round to the house and ask the vendor if this is true!
Getting more and more fed up!! Rant Over.

sammyjammy

londonlydia wrote: »

Thanks for all the advice.

Well decided to make me 'cheeky offer' of 220k. Which got shot straight down by the EA saying that a higher offer had already been rejected. He said the offer was 235k. So I asked if he could put the offer in anyway which he proceeded to say it will be rejected and his instructions from the Vendor was to reject anything below 235k!!! Am I being fed BS? Tempted to pop round to the house and ask the vendor if this is true!
Getting more and more fed up!! Rant Over.

It might be true, doesn't mean they'll get a buyer willing to pay it though. It is the EAs job to pass on ALL offers to the vendor, it isn't the EAs job to tell them what to do.

ruggedtoast

If you put the offer in writing they have to pass it on. There is no real reason for them to lie to you, they want to sell the house after all.

Guide prices are used by EAs to win instructions. They offer the false hope to the seller that someone will offer the top of the range. EAs that use this practice are not great to deal with ime.