Making offers

Lemoncurd

When making an offer on a house how close to the asking price have you made it and what reasons did you give for offering the amount that you did?

Lemoncurd

Interesting... we're planning on making an offer today and had come up with a figure about 8% under the asking price. The justification being that the house needed a lot of work and that a house in the same terrace but with a few advantages sold for quite a bit less only two months ago. We were just a bit worried about offending the vendors.

When I sold my last house it was marketed at £150,000, we then dropped it to £145,000, had an offer of £138,000 which we refused and then they upped it to £139,000 saying it was the absolute maximum they could afford and we accepted that.

frugal_dougal_3

Lemoncurd, I think you have pretty much answered your own question. Not many properties sell for the full asking price unless someone is desperate to buy.

If a house is in poor condition there is no need to worry about offending the vendors with a low offer, but obviously if it is too low then someone else might snap it up.

If you put in an offer and it is accepted straight away you are always left with the thought that you could have got it for less, but if you get a survey done and there are a lot of adverse points made you can always reduce your original offer.

Spendless

When we bought our house in summer 2001 (before house prices had risen here). It was up for £41,500 due to needing work on it. As i knew the area well i knew that done the house would be worth late £40,000s/early £50,000.

I knew the price was cheap but still asked if he'd knock the £500 off to which he agreed. If he hadn't i'd have paid full asking price as i knew we were getting a bargain, the house at the end of the street (admittedly on a corner plot) went up for £55,000 and then changed to £60,000 when the first sale fell through.

Meanwhile i had a small 2 bed MTH which we were renting out. At this point i was anywhere between £5,000-£10,000 negative equity with it having bought it for £25,000 in Dec 94.

By the time
the tenants moved out the housing boom had happened in our town and we put my place up for sale (by now it also needed some money spending on it) at £38,000. I had several offersr within days and accepted £39,500 on it. Unfortunately the sale fell through at the last minute and the place was re-marketed at £39,500. I sold a week later at £40,000 though the estate agent offered to keep it on the market to see if i could get anything higher.

What i'm saying is to me there is no right or wrong answer it depends on the local market, how sought after the property and location is and so on.

reverie

I recently offered £190,000 on one on for £199,950. They said they really wanted a little more (on reflection I think they probably would have taken the first offer if I had said no, but I was really keen and wanted it off the market quickly) I went to £192,000. After homebuyers report raised various issues, I asked for a drop of £6,000 (the surveyor suggested a drop of £12,000, which was good for bargaining but not entirely justified in my opinion), they agreed to £3,000. So, am due to exchange and complete next week at £189,000.

I think you have to be cheeky enough with your offers to hope for a good buy, but reasonable enough to make sure they know you are serious. I don't think anyone should be worried about making low offers, people expect it with the market in the state of flux that it is at the moment.

Lemoncurd

Well we've put our offer in, 272,000 when they were asking 290,000. Still waiting to hear back, the house really does need a lot of work so we're unlikely to increase our offer by much (if at all) if it is turned down.
I doubt it will be accepted though as the owner bought it for 263,000 two years ago and has tried to do a lot of work (just hasn't finished anything or done it to a good standard) so they are probably hoping for more.

frugal_dougal_3

Lemoncurd wrote:

I doubt it will be accepted though as the owner bought it for 263,000 two years ago and has tried to do a lot of work (just hasn't finished anything or done it to a good standard) so they are probably hoping for more.

You might be lucky. A bodged job is worse than one that was never started in the first place.

It's amazing the number of people who fancied themselves as property developers then realised that they didn't have the ability to do it.

mrcow

Lemoncurd wrote:

what reasons did you give for offering the amount that you did?

Back in 2002 when it was more of a seller's market....

It was easy.....

Our buyers knocked down our price by £1k
So we knocked £2k off the house we were buying (just to feel like we weren't losing out).

Reason given....it needed a lot of work.

I now wish I'd gone for a higher discount and bartered up.....but ho-hum, you learn as you go.

Good luck with your offer.

divadee

I voted the asking price, but then i bought my first place in 1999 when the market was just starting to pick up that was £51,950 she then said just give me £51,000 flat woo-hooo i thought.

then when i moved to my current house we had already inherited half of it and had to buy out mr divadees sister so again gave her exacly half of what it was worth cant really negotiate with family. also she had done us a favour as she went with the probate valuation of £160,000 when we bought the house after it sitting empty for about a year and a bit it was worth £200,000 but she said just give me £80,000.

deemy2004

I think houses in Coventry will be going cheap

Offers < 15% ?

Lemoncurd

Well our 6% under the asking price offer has been rejected
We've put in a FINAL offer of 3.5% under the asking price which I get the impression the owner still isn't at all happy about but is considering as yesterday she was made redundant (from her job as an estate agent so I wonder what that says about the current state of the market...).