"discouraged" from second offer....

chappers

So you don't want to spend an extra £5K, do you think the vendor wants to lose £40k. By your reckoning no house should be valued above £500K then.
How can everyone be saying its the vendors who will be sorry how do you know whether this house is over/undervalued. How do you know that they will be sorry or won't be able to sell the property, how do you know what the market is doing in that area.

Basically the house is worth what your prepared to pay for it, and the seller can sell it for whatever price you like.
The estate agent is legally obliged to pass on any offer you make, you can either re-submit your offer, up it or walk away.

jaype

Send a note to the vendor at home. Even a monkey could see that the market is wobbly, so chances are they don't want to put their move on hold forever and would rather take the money and run. Chappers is wrong - they're not losing 40k (unless they bought the place last July or suchlike) - they'll have made a fortune on it in the last few years. 40k isn't even 10 per cent of the asking price.

country_sport

It could be said agents were partly responsible for the boom in house prices, they dont want to lose this without a fight!

chappers

jaype wrote: »

Send a note to the vendor at home. Even a monkey could see that the market is wobbly, so chances are they don't want to put their move on hold forever and would rather take the money and run. Chappers is wrong - they're not losing 40k (unless they bought the place last July or suchlike) - they'll have made a fortune on it in the last few years. 40k isn't even 10 per cent of the asking price.

What a load of rubbish let me put it another way they will be £40K worse off and the percentage of the asking price is irrelevant, They may be in a position where they have to sell for a certain price and as I said previously, if the price they are asking is the going rate for that property in that area, then why should they reduce the price, just to please someone who is not willing to pay it.
Now we all like a bargain and I would haggle like hell myself to get the best price I could on a house purchase but as I said there is only so much you can do and it is no good complaining about it.They don't have to sell to you and you don't have to buy.

gordonstights

I was told the same thing by an EA just before Christmas. I went away and thought there was no point in offering anymore (as it was I was offering 15K below the asking price).

2 weeks later I got a call from the branch manager at the EA who told me she had been looking at the file and noticed that we had made an offer that didn't go anywhere and did we just decide that we didn't want the house anymore?! I said no, we want it but the guy I spoke to made it sound as if there was no point in making an offer unless it was around the asking price - and I told her that we simply cannot afford the asking price.

So branch manager asks me to give her an idea of what we'd be willing to pay. I told her (stupidly) as I still thought this wasn't going anywhere! Now my suggested price was 8K below asking price. She said she thinks they may go for that and told me she would come back to me after having a word with the seller.

After another week or so of the EA pressuring the seller to accept our offer (they basically told me that they wanted him to accept as they didn't think he will get another offer as high as ours & we are FTB, with mortgage in principal etc) we agreed on 6.5K less than asking price.

Then he accepted a higher offer with another EA a week later.... the git

Anyway what I am trying to say is forget what the EA said - come back to them with all the reasons why you are not offering the asking price and make your next offer. But, don't tell them your highest offer yet, just because of what that EA said. I did and ended up agreeing on 1.5K more than our max because I thought the negotiations were over.

Good luck!

Jonbvn

boinging wrote: »

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Apologies, I just wonder if people read the boards before posting

See my thread on - Offering on a Property - The Guide

What an arrogant post! :mad:

You could have just posted a link to your guide. Remember the MSE motto? "There are no stupid questions" - STUPID!

General_Mayhem

The EA is just doing his/her job. They are trying to get you to offer more, your job is to try and offer the least possible!

Ignore them, put in your offer, and see what happens. In the current climate I would be quite happy to offer well under the asking price, and be prepared to sit and wait for the seller to become desperate.

jaype

chappers wrote: »

What a load of rubbish let me put it another way they will be £40K worse off and the percentage of the asking price is irrelevant, They may be in a position where they have to sell for a certain price and as I said previously, if the price they are asking is the going rate for that property in that area, then why should they reduce the price, just to please someone who is not willing to pay it.
Now we all like a bargain and I would haggle like hell myself to get the best price I could on a house purchase but as I said there is only so much you can do and it is no good complaining about it.They don't have to sell to you and you don't have to buy.

Why is my comment 'rubbish' - I'm sure I have as much right to post as you do? The market isn't very strong, so what's the harm in testing, especially as you're not asking for a 25 percent reduction, so it's not exactly super-cheeky? I thought the point of this board was to save people money, or am I missing something? Is one of the biggest purchases of your life somehow exempt?

Anyway, rude people aside, the point is that all that is known is the fact they are going abroad. An offer is an offer, whatever the EA thinks - and this is the issue - , and it should be put forward for the vendors to make up their mind - pricing isn't an exact science and they may just be desperate to sell up and go.

chappers

Apologies Jaype I didn't mean to be rude but if the current market value of their house is £530k and they took £490 they would be losing £40k. the time they have owned their house for is irrelevant, so is the percentage of the value.
As you said pricing is not an exact science and people price their hosues for different reasons some for greed some out of neccesity, we don't know that these vendors are doing this and for all we know they may have already under priced it for a quick sale and it might be the OP who is the greedy one.

merlinthehappypig

It totally depends on the seller's situation and there is no right or wrong strategy, however, we were in a similar situation with a property last October.

They were emigrating and had originally marketed the house for £649950. When we viewed it had been reduced to offers around £624000, give or take a few pounds, I can't remember exactly.

We offered £550000. They turned that down and said they would take £585000. We decided that this was too much and left it at that, withdrawing our offer.

We got chased up over a period of around 5 weeks and after reducing the price bit by bit, they said they would take £550000 after all. By then it was clear that house prices were starting to head down and we had seen other houses which made £550000 look expensive.

Eventually we were offered the house for £515000. This may be completely irrelevant to your situation as each seller is different but, unless you absolutely love the place, it might be worth continuing to look at other houses and see what happens.