First time seller needs help please!!

Flummaxed

Thanks for your comment HazyJo. Think you could be right about the carpets. Oh, I'm really disliking all this house-selling business.

It feels to me that the problem with all of this is that houses in the bracket just above the £250,000 mark - say around £260,000, are having to be artificially 'deflated' due to this cursed stamp duty. So, if a house's real worth is somewhere closer to the £262,000 mark, buyers are being put off paying it because of the duty, thereby forcing vendors to lower the price of the property to below the £250,000 if they want to get a sale. I'm just trying to get something closer to what I feel is the real value of a house of this size, plus the fact that it is detached, which should be a bonus.

Maybe I just have to 'swallow' it, along with all the others who are caught up in this unjust tax threshold and, I feel, are being penalised by it. My head is just going round and round with it all at the moment.

Thanks for your comment though.

Flummaxed

Hi kwmlondon,
Sorry only just saw your post. Didn't see it before I replied to HazyJo. Thank you for the link, I'll take a look at that.

I wouldn't really want to take all the carpets out, so can see HazyJos point of view about not including them as extras. I don't feel that anyone who buys the house would need to replace the carpets, as they are relatively new and in good and clean condition and are a neutral colour. However, I still wouldn't have any use for them myself, also a large, custom fit venetian blind in one window, that would cost a couple of hundred quid, I was going to leave as part of the 'fittings'. I'll look at the link you've kindly posted as it may give me other ideas.

I guess everybody's different, so what one person might be prepared to pay extra for, another person might not wish to negotiate on such things.

Thanks for taking the time to post a suggestion.

Best wishes

hazyjo

I know they can be included as extras (and know some people rip them out when they move out!), but, personally, I wouldn't be including the carpets as extras. Maybe if they're some which you spent thousands on and you could fit them into your new home, but I would have made it very clear from the outset.

Also, if you've sold as it being 'carpeted', I really don't think it's right to then charge for them.

Jx

yorkshire_terrier_owner

To be honest, as a buyer, if you came back to me after you had accepted my offer and asked for another couple of grand for carpets, blinds etc I would tell you to take them. In the house I bought a couple of months ago the vendors wanted money for curtains and shed. I said I would be changing the curtains anyway and was bringing my own shed so please remove them. They left them anyway.

DRP

Flummaxed wrote: »

//snip

Finally, at the beginning of this week, I received an offer (hooray!!) BUT the offer was for £240,000 - eek! That's £20,000 grand UNDER the starting price I was looking for - aghhh!! I refused the offer, and today I had another call from agent, saying interested party is prepared to go to £250,000 (without even a second viewing - is that strange?). I'm really not sure what to do now.

snip//

Not withstanding any dodgy imaginary offers your EA might cook up, the offer as you describe it is not necessarily strange - they were probably offering at 240 in order to go up to 250 if as expected from the asking price, this was necessary (although if it were me, i wouldn't have jumped 10k at once :money: )

Ivana_Tinkle

The usual advice about doing a deal over the fixtures and fittings is that, if HMRC query it, you need to be able to justify the figure you arrived at, based on the second-hand value of the goods. eg a fridge, even if fairly new, isn't worth more than £50; blinds and curtains are going to be trivial amounts, as are carpets; a shed or summerhouse might be a couple of hundred. When you add it up like that, it's very difficult to get to more than a few hundred quid.

As the seller, this isn't necessarily your problem, as it won't be you arguing with HMRC a few months after completion, BUT you do run the risk that your buyer realises, a few weeks into the conveyancing, what dodgy ground they're on, or their solicitor points it out, and they, effectively, drop their offer. It's just something to be aware of.

Flummaxed

Thanks Ivana (and everyone),

I guess I'll just have to decide whether or not to take the hit due to the stamp duty ceiling. Maybe now is not the time to sell at all. Maybe if house prices came down all round, it would be beneficial to all, as I'd feel I was getting a more realistic price at £250,000 for mine, also, properties I'm looking to buy would have come down too. Still, that's another argument altogether - house prices! Now I know why I haven't ventured into this particular game before - it just all feels like a big, expensive headache.

Thanks to everyone for your imput. It's nice to get others' opinions.