Be patient, lower the price or pull out?

cuteusmaximus

Your opinions are sought, even from the resident pedants (resipedants)

We've had our property on Housenetwork since mid-June and for the past week co-listed with a high street agent.

As soon as we listed our place we started to view other properties for sale. Nearly 50 viewings later we have finally found a place we really like (but are not in love with and could let go as it is overpriced in our opinions).

We had three offers in late July at £140K, 5K below asking price. We counter offered £142 and in each case was turned down. The buyers were all in a hurry to move, and we didn't want to be pressured into buying something we didn't like.

Since then viewings have tailed off. Now that we've found a place we like £140K or even less would be fine. Once we have an offer accepted we'd be in a better place to negotiate the price for the house we want (or somewhere else) as we'd be proceed-able, and this is more of a buyers market now.

Our place really needs to be viewed to appreciate it, as it looks a bit naff from the external photos. Here are the two listings.
http://www.housenetwork.co.uk/my_site.asp?id=mincingrm&house=1
http://www.novahomes.co.uk/propertydetails.php?id=1002100

I see three main possibilities:

1) Take the house off the market with the intent to relist after Christmas. If house prices continue to fall this would actually work in our favour, of course. I wonder how much of a deterrant that "stale listings" are on prospective viewers.

2) Drop the price. Anybody reading this forum for more than 30 seconds will read the phrase "any house will sell at the right price." Mrs CM think that if we drop the price that we will look desperate and that people are still going to offer 5K less than our asking price.

3) Be patient. According to our estate agent an identical flat down the road just sold for £144 (though we can't yet see it on the internet) . That may have been before the recent Northern Rock debacle though. Anyway the estate agent seems to think the current asking price is reasonable.

Any thoughts are appreciated

p.s.
Here is the place we want, in case anyone is interested or has any comments
http://www.novahomes.co.uk/propertydetails.php?id=1001559

Doozergirl

Have you had any viewers from the EA?

I'd keep it up, personally. When you initially hit rightmove is the time to sell - the listing does go stale and it doesn't come up as new for anyone. EAs are usually guilty of changing the prices very briefly so that the property shows up as new on people's searches. After Christmas is a quiet time, I can't see any benefit to pulling it off the market during what will probably still be a busier time than January.

We have viewers. They are coming in a steady stream and we have a second viewing on Friday. It's not totally dead. I like the look of your place actually. It is quite sweet for a small family. I'm dead soft on flats though for some reason

pinkshoes

Don't like the photo of the bedroom! The pine built in units are very outdated, the background colour is scary, and not sure about that quilt... i know these are only superficial things, but it IS the only double bedroom, so could put people off.

Why didn't you accept £140k? Sounds reasonable. Couldn't you put "offers in excess of £140k...?"

Badger_Lady

If you advertise a property at £146,950, the best offer you can normally expect is £140,000. It's very normal to make an offer of 95% asking price (depending on local market conditions), so your bidders would have been surprised to have their offers turned down.

If you have now decided that you would accept an offer of this level, why not try 'repricing', by changing it to "offers around" or "fixed price" at £140k, to give a clear idea of what you're expecting?

I went for a marketing job with an estate agent recently, and read about a very interesting thing that they did to shift property - they had a weekend "sale" where they convinced their property owners to "drop the price" by 2-8% for one weekend only, and spent all weekend conducting open viewings at all the properties.

It was clever because the sellers were actually "dropping" their price to the level they were willing to sell at (rather than asking price), and because it was "one weekend only", the buyers were pressured to only give full-price offers.

Hence, lots of properties got sold and no-one actually got a lower price than they originally wanted.

The house you've said you'd like to buy looks lovely, by the way - fingers crossed for you :-)

telfordwhite

The reason you can't sell is quite obvious.....

who would want to live in MINCINGLAKE road.....:eek:

cuteusmaximus

I agree it's a horrible name for a street. It reminds me of this scene in "The Holy Grail":

ZOOT: Welcome, gentle Sir Knight. Welcome to the Castle Anthrax.

GALAHAD: The Castle Anthrax?
ZOOT: Yes. Oh, it's not a very good name, is it? Oh, but we are nice and we will attend to your every, every need!

cuteusmaximus

When we were offered £140K we turned it down for a couple of reasons.

There had been a similar flat up the road sell in January 2007 for £137500 with a smaller garden and dated interior (ours has been refurbished). So we did think that £142 was a fair price, and at the time the market was still going up.

Mainly it was the fact that we just hadn't found anywhere we liked. Personally I hate moving, I spent my childhood up to age 15 moving house once or twice a year. We are only moving now because we want a big family and our current place isn't big enough.
The point is that we didn't want to buy an "OK" house with the intention of moving up again in a few years, we wanted to find our perfect home that we could move-in-live-in-and-leave-our-bones-in-the-back-garden kind of place.

The estate agent thinks we should drop the price. He writes: "The market is slow at the moment and price is a critical factor in attracting purchasers. Lowering the price may be the right tactic to adopt in order to sell now."

I tend to think changing the price (as suggested) to "offers over £140K" would be fine,
but Mrs CM agrees with the previous poster that we'll only ever get the maximum offer of 95% of whatever we are asking.

Thanks for all who replied. Regarding the decor in the master bedroom, all I can say is that I as the male have no say in how our house is decorated. I used to be big into decorating, until I got married. At that point it was agreed that I could decorate the bathroom how I wished. Eventually that privilege was taken from me, so now all that's left is my desk at work :rolleyes:

Conrad

Jeeze, you looked at over 50 homes until you found one, and even that is only ok!!!

We thought we were fussy viewing 10 or so.

Badger_Lady

Conrad wrote: »

Jeeze, you looked at over 50 homes until you found one, and even that is only ok!!!

We thought we were fussy viewing 10 or so.

Blimey, I looked at 70-odd and thought I was rushing it! (Took me 4 full days )