Private buying - agreeing on a price

Vikaroo

The house is in a rural location and is an ex council house on a street of all the same style houses, the rest of the villiage where the house is located is made up of houses that are bigger and much more individual in style. That is why it is difficult to scope an idea. There are no other similar houses other than the ones in the street. For this particular area.

Dan-Dan

Thing is , theres every chance things will be a lot rosier for house sellers 12 months from now , so any price agreed now , doesnt mean the seller wont decide to try there luck on the open market in 12 months time

cattie

I'm with Dan on this, what is the point in you offering on a house that you may not be in a position to buy for 9 - 12 months?

Any vendor with an ounce of common sense would be asking agents to give a market valuation of their house prior to actually committing to the sale at the time you are in a position to buy & is hardly going to accept selling to you at a totally unrealistic price should prices in your area start to increase.

I'm not sure why you are even actively looking for properties right now actually, it all seems pretty fruitless & a bit of a waste of time until you at least have a deposit & seen a lender to get an AIP.

martindow

With the stamp duty threshold you need to think carefully whether it is worth offering more than 125,000.

Vikaroo

We have had an AIP. And why wouldn't the seller want to sell privatley? With us being first time buyers there is no chain from our side of things and the seller will save loads on estate agent fees. They are willing to wait because they are planning on building their own property and need to draw this up first. They may change their mind and put it on the market who knows? Anyay we went to look round today and we love it! The owner says they are more than happy to wait for us to get the funds together. I dooubt house prices will jump by massive amounts in the next 12 months otherwise the market which is only just starting to pick up would suffer. We have taken advice from this website which states that it may be a good idea to put letters through doors in an area that you would like to buy. That is exactly what we did. Didn't think we'd get any fast responses. We stated our time frame in the letters. What's the problem? As it happens we didn't mention a price to the owner but he has stuff he wants to finish on the house. Says he will wait, may change his mind but so far good enough for us. Saves him and us a lot of mither!

Vikaroo

Oh and we weren't actively looking, we haven't looked around a single house prior to this, nor were we planning to, we just thought that if we posted letters with this much time left to save and stated our time frame that people would bear us in mind if they plan to sell in that time frame themselves. We thought if we left it until we were ready nobody would reply because they would be put on the spot and not want to sell their house that short notice. When the seller contacted us we stated that we were not in a position to buy yet and said we would have to miss out, but the seller said they wern't looking to sell yet either and would wait until we were ready.