Sale agreed on my house 7 months ago, but could get more now. What should I do?

GDB2222

dil1976 said:

GDB2222 said:

Gavin83 said:

I agree with the last poster. It is a !!!!!! thing to do to someone but none the less £20-25k is a lot of money. It's a moral decision more than anything else. Has the buyer already spent any money, for surveys, solicitors, etc?

The actual process is easy. You contact the estate agent and tell them you want to remarket. They'll likely try and talk you out of it as it's more work for them but ultimately it's your decision.

If the buyer has spent money on surveys etc, then a reasonable compromise would be to reimburse that.


There are loads of posters on this forum who are incredibly generous in giving away money - other people's money, that is.

Do you include yourself in that final statement? Seeing as you have told them to offer to reimburse any fees already paid, when there is no obligation too.

Touche, although I didn't actually tell them to reimburse the fees. 

I pointed out that compromise, as the OP appeared to be looking for a face-saving way out. 

Gavin83

GDB2222 said:

Gavin83 said:

I agree with the last poster. It is a !!!!!! thing to do to someone but none the less £20-25k is a lot of money. It's a moral decision more than anything else. Has the buyer already spent any money, for surveys, solicitors, etc?

The actual process is easy. You contact the estate agent and tell them you want to remarket. They'll likely try and talk you out of it as it's more work for them but ultimately it's your decision.

If the buyer has spent money on surveys etc, then a reasonable compromise would be to reimburse that.

Yeah, I agree, it's the reason I asked. Of course legally the OP can walk away and not reimburse anything but it feels extremely morally dubious to halt the sale to make more money while ignoring the outlay the buyer has already made.

I expect most people will advise that they should continue with the sale but were they in the same position would they be so keen? I expect not.

Section62 makes a valid point. I'm in the middle of buying my first house at the moment so looking at it from a buyers perspective is easier for me. If there was a crash and prices dropped by say 20% before we exchanged (talking nearly £90k here) I think I'd have to revise my offer. I'd feel awful doing it, especially given our vendor is (so far) lovely but it's too much money to ignore. For £5k-£10k I wouldn't bother.

csgohan4

is the 20-25k gain an opinion by an Estate Agent or just a guestimate?

how likely will you get this gain?

goodwithsaving

I have accepted an offer which was made on my property a few months ago after the buyer I (stupidly) initially went with, withdrew. Could I have got more if I had gone to full re-market again? Yes. No doubt quite a bit more, but I didn't. I listened to my conscience and my gut feeling, and offered to someone I had really wanted to sell to in the first place, for quite a lot less than the other offer had been.
Sure money rules, but at the end of the day you buyers have stuck with it and when sellers do this and then find themselves unable to sell quickly or have to take a hit, I do smile to myself and think 'that's karma'.

MJM1972

I'll be honest, I wouldn't wait 7 months for a purchase, and as you've stated, you still haven't had an offer accepted, so your poor buyer will be waiting many more months, and as others have said, house prices are volatile.......what happens if the market takes a sharp nose dive, would you be happy if your buyer wanted a reduction in price? I'm assuming not! Your buyer has been more than patient, cut them a little slack and just go with the original price. Yes, £25k is a lot of money, but it's not guaranteed money, so pop that thought out of your head!!!

potatosalad

Thanks everyone for the financial (and moral) advice! Here are my thoughts on some of the suggestions...

I promise that the lack of movement from myself in 7 months isn't through lack of trying. We are looking for houses in an incredibly competitive area; every single one of the eight houses we've offered on has gone to best and final offers and we've offered as much as £20k over the asking price (>£15k on four of them!). So on this point, I have absolutely no guilt about "holding up" the sale as some people have suggested. There is really nothing more we could've done!

On the point from @Section62 that my property could go down in value, while this seems very unlikely to happen, yes I think I would absolutely accept this and not resent if a buyer dropped out for this reason! If my house comes down in value then so would other houses I'm looking at, and therefore I could still make the same kind of move. And realistically, if the house goes down in value then the mortgage company won't even give out a loan higher than that value anyway so the transaction inevitably crashes. 

@csgohan4 - I am very confident that I'd get at least this much more based on other houses nearby (often slightly smaller or in worse condition) being marketed for higher prices and selling really quickly. I really have no doubt whatsoever that my house would sell very quickly and for a substantially increased price.

I do really appreciate the buyer's patience, although she has also threatened to drop out of the sale several times and has made it clear that she is looking at other properties. I think she's now starting to realise that she's getting an absolute bargain on my house and hasn't found anywhere else nearly as good within her price range. As far as I'm aware, she hasn't spent anything on the purchase yet (no surveys have been done on my house), but I wouldn't be opposed to reimbursing her for the expenses she's had.

The stamp duty doesn't impact her as she's a first time buyer but does have a big impact on me. When I first sold, I was very much expecting to be moved before the stamp duty deadline, but I'm now looking at a bill of around £12-£15k on this. The prices of the houses I'm looking at have also massively increased too, which is making it hard to be competitive with the lower sale price agreed. If I had an extra £20k to work with then obviously this would help!

@m4x1ne made a really good point about how it bad looks if I have dropped out of the sale to get more money, and how unattractive that could be to future buyers. I am wondering if it might be the better bet for me to just cancel the transaction entirely and re-list it in a few months. I've got a lot going on in my life anyway so it wouldn't be the worst thing to remove the stress of this situation. 

I'm really not shying away that it could be seen as a horrible thing to do. I dread the thought of making the call to the estate agents, but seriously - it's £20,000+ I'm talking about! It's more than I'd save in a year. I don't know how so many people are completely nonchalant to the idea of just throwing this amount of money away (especially on a forum centred around sound financial decisions!). I think it's easy to give the moral advice and think this is greater than anything else, but £20k is a massive amount of money to ignore.

lonibra

OP - There's no shame in pulling out. Property transactions in England are dog-eat-dog, and 95/100 of vendors in your place would pull out for a much smaller gain, let alone 20k+. Or far more trivial reasons. You actually have a very good one.

You can bet your bottom dollar that if your buyer got a chance to buy a similar property for 20k less, they'd jump for it.

Sunsaru

The only person you have to justify your actions to is yourself, not this forum.

Whatever you do just make sure you doing it for the right reasons.

JJR45

Presumably if you get a new offer and prices drop £20k in the next 6 or 7 months you will want to drop £20k?
If you can't afford or can't find anywhere to move don't move.
But it is bad form thinking of remarketing because you have held up the sale IMHO.

C_N_

Another thing to consider is if the mortgage lender for any potential buyer would agree with this price increase, otherwise they may come unstuck when it comes to the valuation and then you're back at square one.