Accept an offer without a house to go to?

usupnorth

Hi

A simple question, perhaps, though I will elaborate!

We are waiting for a suitable house to come up in a particular area, while marketing our own property.

It states in our contract that if we were to pull out of selling our house to a buyer once we'd accepted their offer, we'd be liable to pay our estate agent some remuneration.

If we get an acceptable offer on our house before we actually have a house to buy, it seems to me we would be best NOT to officially accept the offer, buy simply to agree the price and say that we will officially accept the offer once we have found somewhere. We could, perhaps, offer some extra assurance that we were not trying to seek a bigger offer, and to clarify our position.

This would seem to protect us against liability for estate agent money in the unlikely event that we should decide to hold off on our move and pull out of a sale (perhaps because we simply could not find a decent property in a reasonable time - not that we have any thoughts of that at all right now). If our buyer pulls out first, of course, we have no liability for fees.

What do you think? Is that normal?

Notmyrealname

> If we get an acceptable offer on our house before we actually have a house to buy, it seems to me we would be best NOT to officially accept the offer, buy simply to agree the price and say that we will officially accept the offer once we have found somewhere.

Don't expect to sell it any time soon then. I doubt a purchaser would be interested in waiting for you to find somewhere whilst you dilly dally around deciding to accept their offer for a few months - they'll just go find one of the many other houses for sale.

Judith_W

Depending on how keen you are to move, I would suspect it would be wise to consider accepting the offer but stating you haven't completed the chain, then look hard to find something. If the buyer starts getting twitchy, you would have to look at renting short term.

girl_withno_name

Our vendors accepted our offer without having found a house to go to ... as Not myrealname says, we'd have carried on looking or offered on our second choice if they had said "but we won't be officially accepting the offer until some, as yet undetermined and not guaranteed time in the future"

As it was I said that we wouldn't be instructing solicitors, searches or surveys until they'd found somewhere to buy.

googler

If I were offering on your house, and you tried to faff around like this with me, I'd walk away. You hedging your bets against the chance you might pay your agent's fees on a failed transaction are none of my concern, and I don't see why I should be inconvenienced to make things work between you and your agent.

If I put an offer in, it will have a limit date - i.e you accept or decline my offer by (say) 5pm on Friday 15th Aug, otherwise it's assumed to be withdrawn.

DVardysShadow

googler wrote: »

If I were offering on your house, and you tried to faff around like this with me, I'd walk away. You hedging your bets against the chance you might pay your agent's fees on a failed transaction are none of my concern, and I don't see why I should be inconvenienced to make things work between you and your agent.

If I put an offer in, it will have a limit date - i.e you accept or decline my offer by (say) 5pm on Friday 15th Aug, otherwise it's assumed to be withdrawn.

As seller, if I did not feel desperate to move out and could not find the better place I was looking for to your time scales as potential buyer, I could live with your offer

Miss_Ratty

We have just accepted an offer on our house and have not found another place yet. We are just thinking we are lucky to have got the offer we did, and will rent until we do find somewhere if needs be. I wouldn't muck them around but our buyers have said they're in no rush to move in, so hopefully we have a bit of time, but if not, we're hoping that by renting we may also be able to bargain better when we do find a nice place.

mothershipton

in this climate you would be best to accept the offer and move out even if you havent found anything. But you would be in a better position to buy if you had the money from your sale in the bank account. We did this on our last move and it was lovely having the proceeds in the bank even for a few months.

MobileSaver

usupnorth wrote: »

it seems to me we would be best NOT to officially accept the offer,

What do you think? Is that normal?

No, that's not normal and is a very high-risk strategy for you - the chances are you will seriously annoy/frustrate your potential buyer and lose them.

I've been in a similar situation before and we carried on with the sale and moved out of our home and in with family/friends. This allowed us to buy our new dream home chain free, made life so much easier for everyone and the couple of months living with family/friends was actually kind of fun and a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

usupnorth

Thanks all.

For all those who suggest accepting the offer and renting, I should have saved you the typing by saying that it would be hugely financially costly to us BUT I don't mean because of the rent itself: we are on a very good mortgage tracker that no longer exists and can't be matched now. The terms do not allow us to port it unless we buy and sell at the same time. I wont bore you with more details on that, but trust me, it would cost a small fortune to lose that deal. Even when we factor in any likely discount we might be able to negotiate from a chainless position, it would still be dwarfed, by the best estimate I can make.

Luckily, we don't have the urgency of a change of job, ill health or something like that in this move, so we're not going to move to the wrong place just because we're getting offers on ours (which we are, fortunately). I know how precious willing buyers are at the moment, from another recent thread. So we're scanning the market every day. There's just nothing where we want it right now, as I write. We are certainly not dilly dallying. There are things you can control and things you can't.

On 'frustrating' or 'annoying' buyers: forget liability for agent's fees for a moment. If we accept an offer with nowhere to go, is that really any less frustrating to a buyer than simply agreeing a price that we will accept once we are in a position to sell them the house? Why would you have been any less inconvenienced, googler, if we had officially accepted your offer and then still have taken as long to find a place?

In accepting an offer without a house to go to, we wouldn't be taking it off the market anyway. Most people seem to agree that you only take it off the market once the buyer starts to incur costs on the purchase, such as surveyors' fees etc. Well that wouldn't be happening until we had found somewhere too, as girl_withno_name confirms by what she says.

However, it is interesting to hear all these points and there are clearly people that may be put off if we did not officially accept an offer, as described.

phoebe1989seb

Although we didn't have a clause like that in our contract when we sold last year, I just wanted to give you a bit of reassurance that it is possible to accept an offer then find somewhere to buy in a very short time frame.

We were taken unawares when we received an offer after only twelve days on the market and due to our circumstances (masses of stuff including a hot tub plus three cats - our previous removals had cost in excess of £4k), we weren't prepared/able to go into rented and effectively move twice.

Despite this we managed to find a house - yet we were looking to move 200 miles out of the area to any one of a handful of counties plus we wanted a very specific type of period house - and complete on both sale and purchase within less than three months of originally marketing ours

Our buyers were extremely keen and we didn't want to lose them, and from the outset they told us they had a specific week during which they (and the two couples above them in the chain) wished to complete and we managed to fit in with this - even though we only offered on the house we eventually bought a further month into the process, having withdrawn from the first two purchases we embarked on. We were honest with our buyers about this, they appreciated it and very fortunately we were able to get the whole thing back on track very quickly!

If it were me I definitely wouldn't want to upset my buyers and if going into rented (or staying with family) was an option I wouldn't rule it out - we once had to put our stuff into storage and stayed with family for six weeks between selling one house and buying the next........... but these options are not suitable for everyone and with your mortgage situation I guess it's not worth it for you.

We thought we'd never find the perfect house after pulling out of what we'd thought were two suitable purchases - but we were the first to view the one we ended up buying and as we didn't require a mortgage and had a family member carry out a survey we were able to exchange within about three weeks, so these things can work out even when you think there's no chance........