Offers in excess

juniordoc

If someone else does offer over the odds then they will only end up coming back down when the survey comes in, or when they can'tagree the mortgage as the valuation doesn't match their offer.
Offer what it is worth to you.£500 over asking price is still over! And for many "offers over" is a hope rather than an instructor.

Rambosmum

We've offered on 3 offers over properties. The first was offers over £300k, we offered £305, £320 and £325 - all were rejected and we were told the seller wanted £330, which was above what we thought the house was worth - that was 5 months ago and he house still hasn't sold.

2nd OIEO £280 - Offered £296, got accepted but then we were gazumped.

3rd OIEO £325 - Offered £333, got it.

But where we are houses are going for over asking anyway - we offered 27k over asking (about 9%) and 15k on another (about 5%) and got neither - both went for much more, though I don't know what.

Depends on your market. Here, houses are fetching stupid amounts.

ReadingTim

Depends on how realistic the price one is expected to offer in excess of: sometimes it's low because it's difficult to put an accurate price on the property, or in the hope of sparking a bidding war between people initially seduced by a 'bargain'.

Unfortunately it can also be a wildly optimistic figure "needed" to bail the vendors out of negative equity or fund an onward purchase that they can't otherwise really afford.

If you want to post a link, people will give their opinions as to whether the place you're interested in falls into the former, or latter category. Otherwise, you're basically asking how long is a piece of string...

hazyjo

Our EA wanted us to do OIEO but I said buyers hate it, and I don't like it either.


I am currently watching a couple of houses with OIEO prices, but they've been on the market for weeks/months. I expect they'll take off the OIEO bit soon - in which case I might be interested as would need to offer under.


All depends how long things have been on the market and how realistically priced they are. Sellers are indeed often deluded (no offence to anyone - I may even be one of them lol!).


Jx

Hoploz

If you can't find alternatives easily then all you can do is offer what you can afford. If you feel you've gone too high afterwards then the mortgage valuation might come in lower, enabling you to renegotiate.

Although nobody wants to pay more than necessary, you have to weigh up the extra few £k now against waiting and waiting to find something else better and cheaper. If there's plenty available that's no problem. But if you're still going to be hanging in there waiting for a bargain a year down the line, you'll more than likely end up having to settle for a less good property as you find the market has risen 5% or 10%. I've seen it happen.

I've also been in the 'best & finals' scenario 3 times. Twice in 2007 we offered what the house was 'worth'
Third time (2014) we offered more, as we had seen the two we failed to get sell for 100k (30%) more a year or two later. We knew we wouldn't find anything as good for a long time so we considered it to be worthwhile going over. We got it, but we were told 2 other offers were very similar. So you could say that was indeed the market value.

clint_S

I hate Offers Over. Its just seems so pretentious, to the extent that I'll often have a negative opinion of the house before I start looking at it. I'll actually be more critical just because of the Offers over tag and I'll also have a negative opinion of the seller due to this as well.


The funny thing is that they aren't any cheaper than similar houses if anything they seem to be priced slightly higher.

KateySW

Since we've been house hunting, we've had two experiences of bidding on houses that were OIEO. In the first instance, it escalated into a bidding war - we bid £15,000 over the OIEO price but didn't win in the end.

Second time round, we were the only bidders and offered £5000 over the OIEO price, which we thought was fair considering the amount of work needed on the house. We were then told that the seller would not except anything less than £20,000 over the OIEO price, which we thought was a bit bonkers! :shocked:

I'm not sure if that's the norm, I live in Bristol so the housing market here can be a bit brutal. But we were pretty cheesed off by the whole experience really and since then, went for a property that just had an asking price.