Martin Lewis Blog: 'House offer accepted, now they want £20,000 more! What should I do?'

Pinner17

 I have been a property valuer and surveyor for over 50 years( now retired). What you said Martin was sound advice. You are only a first time buyer once after that you will normally be dependent on a sale to buy.This makes you an attractive prospect. One of the things a first time buyer needs to establish is the actual position of the vendor - the ideal vendor is one who has to sell- e.g an executor sale if the vendor is in a chain of transactions then there are multiple reasons for things to go wrong. In the majority of cases my experience has been that when a buyer looses their “ideal” property the much prefer the one they eventually move into.

SplicedSurprise

The same happened to us, albeit 30+ years ago, when seller tried to increase price by £5k after our offer had been accepted. Loved the house but walked away on principle and bought instead the house where we still live.....

Section62

scher said:

While I agree with others that it's totally unethical....

I agree with your point about buyers, but would also suggest it isn't possible to judge the vendor as "totally unethical" without knowing more about the situation and their circumstances.

Just suppose, for example, that the EA has now given the vendor an offer from someone else for £40k more than the first buyer has offered.  The vendor knows the first buyer really wants the property and has spent money on the buying process already.  So rather than going straight to acceptance of the second buyer's £40k better offer the vendor is giving the first buyer the opportunity to increase their offer, and has split the difference to try to be fairer to the first buyer.

Would the vendor still be "totally unethical" to do that?  Or would that be deemed a 'fair compromise'?

silvercar

We had similar and walked away. The next set of buyers were then themselves gazumped.

In retrospect we should have agreed then dropped our price back to the original on the day of exchange.

BungalowBel

I'd refuse to pay it.  If I really  wanted the house and it was well along in the conveyancing , I would keep going at the original price, as long as they did not put the house back on the market.

If they did remarket at the higher price, or I wasn't that bothered about the house, then I would pull out.

Murphybear

I agree that the house buying/situation in the U.K. needs changing.

We were looking to buy and saw a lovely house at the top of our budget so we put in an offer just below the asking price.  Before we had spent any money the EA phoned to say the sellers had received a higher offer.  A couple of weeks later they phoned again to say were we still interested as the sale fallen through.  We said no as we could not trust the seller.

We put an offer in on a lovely bungalow but the seller suddenly withdrew saying they had promised to let her father buy it if it came on the market.  Grrrrr …. We decided to look at more bungalows and found a brilliant one, it had a conservatory, a greenhouse, 2 fishponds, a workshop and rows of blackcurrants and raspberries.  Plus it was in a  a tiny quiet village. We bought it and were happy there (the cat loved it ) and we only sold it as we were moving to Devon which was an about 200 miles away.  

We bought it the autumn and in the following spring we were very pleased and surprised to see ~ 100 bright red tulips, they were gorgeous 

TyrePressure

I believe this to be an estate agent scam; perhaps not quite 100% of the time, but mostly.

The sale has been agreed, so the vendor is happy. The estate agent, off their own back, claims that the vendor wants more money. If the buyer agrees, then the vendor is happy because they are getting more money; if the buyer declines, then the vendor is none the wiser and the sale goes ahead just as the vendor was expecting. Either way, the vendor is happy. The estate agent is happier if the scam works because they are on commission, and they have nothing to lose if it does not work. Thus, the buyer should be pretty safe saying no.

SadieO

TyrePressure said:

I believe this to be an estate agent scam; perhaps not quite 100% of the time, but mostly.

The sale has been agreed, so the vendor is happy. The estate agent, off their own back, claims that the vendor wants more money. If the buyer agrees, then the vendor is happy because they are getting more money; if the buyer declines, then the vendor is none the wiser and the sale goes ahead just as the vendor was expecting. Either way, the vendor is happy. The estate agent is happier if the scam works because they are on commission, and they have nothing to lose if it does not work. Thus, the buyer should be pretty safe saying no.

What if the buyer responds to (what they believe is) the seller's games by dropping their offer by £20K? (Which I have seen people be advised to do). Or walks away on principle? How is the agent going to explain that to their client? Would they really risk that to make £2200 commission instead of £2000? It's in their best interests to get as many sales through as quickly possible, not to prolong things or even risk it falling through by inventing a price dispute. 

Slinky

I wonder what happened with this scenario.

Jemma01

No, I don't play games. So grateful for my seller not giving my-now-home to the highest bidder. If that happened, I would have walked away, and there's absolutely nothing I love more than this home. But I'm very hard on principles, got myself in enough trouble for not accepting shady behaviour like this. I don't regret any.