Estate agent terms: What does guide price mean?

Gladallover

Hello,
My partner and I have found a property for sale that we both love and want to put an offer in.
The house is up for £185,000 guide price.
The estate agent seems to have several properties at 'asking price' and others at 'guide price', so I'm really here to ask if anybody knows what the difference is?
My dad thinks estate agents put down a price much lower than they think the property is worth to get more interest in the hopes of starting a bidding war. However, my mum thinks we should make an offer below the guide price as the house is in need of modernisation and will need a lot of money spent on it.

The property was only put on the market this week and it is exactly what we have been looking for. We would really love to buy it but unfortunately £185,000 is very near the top end of our budget.
We aren't sure if we should go straight in and offer £185,000 and hope nobody else makes a higher offer or try an offer below the asking price.

I would be very grateful for any advice.

anselld

Agents prices mean very little no matter what they call them.
When it comes to offer you need to do your own research to decide what it is worth, taking account of the refurb costs.
Various tools here ...
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/mortgages/free-house-prices
... sold prices is the most important (allowing for local average local price movement since sale date).

kingstreet

If you are at the top of your budget and the property needs work, how will you pay for the repairs? Will you need a mortgage? What happens if the extent of the repairs means the lender holds a retention (witholds some of the mortgage funds until the work is done) as you would then need to increase your deposit to bridge that gap?

Not strictly on topic, but you'll need to think about these issues.

Alpha58

Estate Agent doublespeak. I would take it to mean "this is what the vendor wants but we don't agree" - and I would certainly take it as meaning that there is scope for flexibility in the offer.

Gladallover

Thanks for all your replies.
Deciding what offer to make is quite a tricky business. Obviously the property will need a lot of money spent on it to modernise it but it is habitable in is current state, just a little unpleasant!
We are not too concerned about that state of it really as we will have enough saved to make a start on the work, and most of it we can do ourselves to cut costs (lots of tradesmen in the family!).
What Kingstreet mentioned about lenders holding a retention is more worrying for us, it is something we will definitely have to think about.
We have a mortgage in principle arranged but at the time we hadn't seen anything needing modernisation on the market so we didn't ask about that. I think the next step is to contact our mortgage advisor.
Thanks again for the help.