Negotiating with New Builds

sidrockz

Hi All,
I have recently been to a New development and we liked a house and want to proceed with it. The house is priced at 315k. We wanted to negotiate but the sales rep asked if we have a mortgage in principle , and they can negotiate only if we had one. So we went through their Financial adviser and got a mortgage in principle. Now we asked them to add the interiors with the package like Flooring, Blinds etc (which are part of a package they are offering for some homes).and stamp duty included but they straight away refused. when i read through the forums here many have bargained on the house price as well along with the interiors, is it right for us to hold on with my offer?

I personally feel i already negotiated a lot less but any suggestions would really be appreciated.

Thank you

Hutch100uk

Some house builders will negotiate, some won't. It would be unusual for them to offer incentives such as stamp duty and flooring and also a reduced price, it would be one or the other.
I bought a Linden home and they offered stamp duty and flooring but were absolutely not going to budge on the price. If they think another buyer will pay it, they won't take less from you.
It would also depend on how quickly the homes are selling on the estate etc.
I'm not clear from your post whether you actually got a reduced price negotiated then?

SuboJvR

sidrockz wrote: »

Hi All,
I have currently recently been to a Bloor homes and we liked a house and want to proceed with it. The house is priced at 315k. We wanted to negotiate but the sales rep asked if we have a mortgage in principle , and they can negotiate only if we had one. So we went through their Financial adviser and got a mortgage in principle. Now we asked them to add the interiors with the package like Flooring, Blinds etc (which are part of a package they are offering for some homes).and stamp duty included but they straight away refused. when i read through the forums here many have bargained on the house price as well along with the interiors, is it right for us to hold on with my offer?

I personally feel i already negotiated a lot less but any suggestions would really be appreciated.

Thank you

It really depends on the development.

People who have been able to negotiate more, get more money off, get more things included, if the houses aren't selling. If you're talking about a development where houses are being snapped up as soon as they're advertised, there's little need for the developer to bundle stuff in.

Also whether you are using Help to Buy will impact things as well - impacts how much they actually can offer.

sidrockz

Thanks for the quick reply.

@Hutch100 I havent negotiated any kind of money or anything from them yet. The first thing we asked for is the interiors with stamp duty. They have about 4 or 5 homes remaining on the site. This in particular is the sales office which is being built into a house and is due to finish early next year.

@subojvr Yes we are on HTB,

Hutch100uk

Well you can only ask and they say yes or no. Just don't expect anything. It all boils down to how easily they think they will sell.

We tried to get more but they flat out refused. There were loads of houses left on our site too but they all sold so they knew what they were doing.

Crashy_Time

Using their financial advisor and using HTB does not put you in a very strong negotiating position.

sidrockz

Why would it really be such a difference going through their Financial Adviser?

SuboJvR

sidrockz wrote: »

Why would it really be such a difference going through their Financial Adviser?

Well for one thing if you've already agreed it then they don't need to offer you an incentive to choose them, e.g. toward fees. They probably get some referral commission for sending people to set advisors.

I'm not sure it would affect negotiation too much though. Solicitor maybe.

Help to Buy definitely does. Different lenders have different rules about how much they allow developers to offer you, very seldom will you get money off the actual house price as under Help to Buy they are especially keen to keep the prices at what they are valued. Lenders have rules like not accepting more than 1% of the value as a cash incentive, some may accept a stamp duty contribution, some may not. I don't know all the ins and outs as not a broker this is just my experience and initially we were told that our stamp duty contribution wouldn't be accepted. But we really wanted that, rather than money toward flooring which was overpriced. (They offered £5000 for whatever we wanted to use it, so stamp duty in our case. £5000 toward their £7500 flooring bill was less appealing, as we are actually getting our flooring done by someone else for £2700).

sidrockz

So far we haven’t agreed on anything. We did only ask for stampduty and few interior stuff but they rejected it straight away. They only offered at full listed price. And well there’s a £250 cashback for going with their financial adviser. :j

Hutch100uk

sidrockz wrote: »

So far we haven’t agreed on anything. We did only ask for stampduty and few interior stuff but they rejected it straight away. They only offered at full listed price. And well there’s a £250 cashback for going with their financial adviser. :j

Not much you can do I'm afraid. Either accept you get nothing from them, or walk away and hope they come back to you.

We tried this and they never came back. We had to accept we weren't gonna get everything we asked for and went ahead.

SuboJvR

sidrockz wrote: »

So far we haven’t agreed on anything. We did only ask for stampduty and few interior stuff but they rejected it straight away. They only offered at full listed price. And well there’s a £250 cashback for going with their financial adviser. :j

It sounds like a popular development then, and/or they have no reason for trying to push sales now.

I hadn't realised when we reserved ours but we were looking at one of the final plots of their allocation on the development (two different branches of the same builder selling in the same place, bit odd) and this in late May. It seems ages away but for them locking in their final purchases in June/July secured them buyers meaning they would be able to finish up on site by the new year. For that reason they probably had more wiggle room with incentives, but not too much - it is an incredibly popular site and a house like ours now being sold by the other side is going for 25k more....