Offers over in England?

hazyjo

Scotbot wrote: »

What a great idea I wish England adopted it. Would save a lot of angst for buyers and sellers.

Not when there are several notes of interest in and you keep losing out on properties to higher bidders. At least we usually know quite quickly if our offer is accepted or not.


Swings and roundabouts...

topsales

Thanks everyone - it would seem that the system down here is somewhat different re offers over.

eddddy

In my experience, "offers over" often means one of two things...

1. The EA genuinely expects a bit of a bidding war (e.g. a property hotspot, or a property with development potential.)

2. It's a compromise between the seller and EA, for example:

Seller : "I want £200k"
EA : "You need to reduce to a more realistic figure like £185k"
Seller : "No"
EA : "OK, let's put it on at 'Offers over £185k' - and maybe you'll get an offer close to £200k (and pigs might fly)"

If it's option 2, the seller might stubbornly refuse to accept anything less than £200k, or the EA might be able to gently adjust their expectations.

Rambosmum

So put our house on the market for a straight 'asking price' (not offers over). Had several offers, ended up accepting one for 6% over. When that fell through, because we had by then had an offer accepted on a property based on that offer, we put it back on the market at offers over a slightly higher price, as that was the minimum we could really accept. We accepted an offer 2 days later at 9% over the original asking price, 3.5% over the new offers over price. It wasn't the only offer.


The house we have just bought, we offered 8% above asking price - we were one of 9 offers, all asking price and above. The highest offer (not ours) was 13% above the asking price. Due to a strange twist of fate we ended up with the house anyway. The house was not on at 'offers over'.


So it depends on your local market!

wantonnoodle

The house we bought was on at o/o £250k. It had originally been on at £275k, then £265k before being reduced to o/o £250k. It had been on the market since July 2016. Final reduction was early October.

We offered £250k in the 3rd week in October, so it had been on the market a good few months and around 3 weeks since it was reduced. At first the vendor said he wanted nearer £260k, however, as there was little interest, we told the EA we would leave the offer on the table until the end of October. Surprise, surprise, the vendor came back to us a few days later (a couple of days before the end of the month) to accept our offer.

So no, I wouldn't say that offers over means just that - more likely the vendor wants more than that, but a house is only worth what people will pay for it.

AdrianC

Scotbot wrote: »

What a great idea I wish England adopted it. Would save a lot of angst for buyers and sellers.

The main difference is that in Scotland the vendor pays for the valuation survey before marketing the property.

In England and Wales, there was the short-lived Home Information Pack, but a valuation was about the only thing that didn't include.