Finally found a house we like - next steps?!

Danniella

Hi there,

We have been looking for almost 2 years for our "forever" home and we are pretty sure its the property we viewed this evening!

Currently live in a terraced house that we have a mortgage on.

We have savings but the majority of the deposit, fees etc for the new house will come from the equity in our home.

Our house is on the market. It has not sold. We have kept it at the higher figure because with 3 kids, we wanted to find somewhere first. So we can reduce the price and hopefully sell.

QUESTIONS ARE: What happens next? Can we make an offer? How do we make an offer? Do we just phone the estate agents?

Sorry, we have never bought and sold before. Don't know what the next steps are. If someone could advise, it would be greatly appreciated. By the way we have mortgage in principle.

Many thanks

alchemist.1

You can make an offer via the agent. I usually do it by email so there isn't any confusion of figures etc.

I imagine they wont take your offer seriously until you have found a buyer yourself.

Malmo

Expect to have any offer rejected at this stage as you are not proceedable, given that you do not have a buyer. Almost every vendor would look for a proceedable, serious buyer.

How long has your own property been on the market and how many offers have you received in that time?

Davesnave

Depends what the market is like where you are.

When we were last selling at a very slow, difficult time, we had 3 unproceedable couples who wanted to buy, so we agreed a price with each, but refused to take our property off the market.

In our eyes, any one of those couples might have reduced their property to a selling level, but for whatever reason, they didn't.

Some months on, a fourth couple who'd seen the house earlier, yet said nothing, reappeared as proceedable and we agreed a sale at a reduced price, literally overnight.

Immediately, there were frantic communications from the others, suggesting various incentives, but we had no commitment to them, beyond agreeing a hypothetical price. By then, the only incentive that interested us was being sold!

So, if your market is a slow one and the house has been around for a while, the vendor might accept an offer tentatively, but I doubt if they'll show any more commitment than we did.

hazyjo

Ignore me - replied to wrong thread!

brodawel

Firstly you need to make the offer either by phone or in person (I hate email as I never know if it's being dealt with). Because of your situation i.e. not sold, you need to give the seller a reason to wait for you i.e. offer the asking price or whatever. Hopefully (for you at least) they will refuse lower offers from those that can proceed. Also, as you have already mentioned, get yours reduced asap.

We tried to buy a house recently, we are in rented, have nothing to sell and no mortgage needed. The sellers had two other higher offers from people who needed to sell. We offered £5K less than the others (according to the seller) but they wouldn't accept, they decided to wait for one of the others to find a buyer. That £5K made all the difference to them and that's their choice so you never know. Basically what I'm saying is, you need to see off any competition and make an offer too good to refuse so your seller will wait for you (if they can or want to).

hazyjo

Not advisable to still reply to this old thread - sorry, my fault, this was linked to another similar thread and I replied here in error, hence bumping it!


Blonde mo...


Jx

brodawel

hazyjo wrote: »

Not advisable to still reply to this old thread - sorry, my fault, this was linked to another similar thread and I replied here in error, hence bumping it!


Blonde mo...


Jx

:rotfl: never even noticed it was Aug 2015, oh well, hope OP got their house in the end.