Making offers on a house

[Dougy]

Ignore estate agents, they are a pain in the ***. Do your own research and offer what the house is worth to YOU (with an acceptable amount of uplift in your mind if needed). Estate agents have no qualifications, their opinion is just a strangers guess, and one who is trying to extract as much cash from you as possible at that... You will have done more research than them.

 

Tell Mrs dougy she has no qualifications and you wont know which hole to put the andrex round. LOL

 

Some "are" a complete waste of time, with no experience whatsoever.

Some ignorant people think that all they do is answer the phone and utter B S to make themselves some Wonga. Makes me laugh really, but then on the other hand annoys the hell out of Mrs dougy when she gets numpties to deal with thinking they know it all.

 

 

You are buying what will most probably be the biggest expense of your life, yet some folk try and save a few coppers.. Absolutely laughable

Edited March 13, 2016 by Dougy

[al4x]

The simple thing is the market is flying down here an mess arround and you will just loose every house.

Simple advice is get yourself in the best position and ready to go and then make the offer. You have a load more weight behind it, with the new stamp duty and tax rules buying a buy to let now probably isn't the right time everyone is trying to get properties bought and completed before April. After you may find you have more bargaining

[Twistedsanity]

Whenever an estate agents lips move he is lying, we brought our current home 18 months ago and after several failed purchase attempts got one, houses here state "offers in excess of" or "guide price" and I recall bidding £576,000 on one with a guide price of £550,000 and not getting it. I'm not sure what the market is like in Bristol but the best advice is to watch the market for a while and when you find what you are looking for bid the maximum you can afford and think it's worth, everyone wants a bargain and to pay the minimum but round here that attitude means you miss out and start all over again, ours has increased by approx £5k a month since we completed ad we got it for the asking price, go and befriend the estate agents and phone every morning at 9am asking what has come on the market that day, we only got this house for the asking price by calling every day and managed to bid and view before it even got advertised, had it gone to market there would have been several other people bidding in excess of the asking price and we wouldn't be here now, good luck

[flynny]

We just had the same issue a house was on for 340k. Village location views over fields but it didn't take away the fact the inside was 1960''s. All of it.

We started of at 310k purEly because of all the work. But someone's got carried away and we got it for 325k in the end.

If your in no rush then you can call the shots. Everything a estate agent says take with a pinch of salt

Correct , if you have the capital and are in no rush

 

"Bid em in the ballcocks and work your way up to the napper"

 

You will get it cheaper than the asking price,

 

It all depends on how much the owners spent on it, and if they are in no rush to sell etc etc

 

Good luck

 

Flynny

[buze]

Make a good offer, subject to survey, then get an efficient surveyor who will legitimately find all sorts of defects that you can use to lower your offer. It might cost you a £K but could save you £10K.

 

THAT. Don't go cheap on the survey, the surveyor best interest is to flag /anything/ and give you ammunitions to reduce your offer afterward, in a completely legitimate way.

 

Also, prices are flying everywhere. I bought my house £425k less than two years ago in Burnham (Bucks) and Zoopla is now telling me it's worth... 570k.

Edited March 14, 2016 by buze

[Jbob]

Im in the process of moving house too. We looked at a property and and liked it. However I noticed some problems and so requested a second viewing with the estate agent and friendly builder present. He looked at the areas that had made me question the price. In front of the agent the builder quoted me a VERY rough price for the repairs (4K) we then put in an offer and eventually got the price down by 3K. Not much but it brought the property in under budget rather than stretching myself.

 

Next up the surveyor to have a look. Its alway worth offering a lower offer, whats the worst they can say? 'No'. As a first time buyer as long as you have your Mortgage in Principle your just as safe for the seller as anyone else in my experience.

[ferguson_tom]

All depends on the market, our house in Hertfordshire has been on the market 3 times since December (long story) but anyway each time we have put it on it has sold within 24 hours for the full asking price, in fact first time we got offered over the asking price.

 

Forget about the asking price and trying to get a discount off it just to make yourself feel like you got a deal. Go see the house, compare it to others in the local area and put your offer in what you want to pay for it. If thats the asking price then so be it.

 

The suggestion of getting people in to devalue the house after you put the offer in is a bad one imo. If someone tried it with me I would tell them where to stick it and the house would be back on the market quicker than it takes the surveyor to get back to his office!

 

We have just bought a house in Suffolk and on the surface it looks like the market is a lot slower, in truth the good houses are selling very quickly for good money. The stuff hanging about is either **** or overpriced.

Edited March 16, 2016 by ferguson_tom

[rjimmer]

The suggestion of getting people in to devalue the house after you put the offer in is a bad one imo. If someone tried it with me I would tell them where to stick it and the house would be back on the market quicker than it takes the surveyor to get back to his office!

 

 

So would you advise people to buy a property without a survey?

[Medic1281]

It's not devaluing the house. You offer on the thinking that the house is worth that much in good condition. You the find out the problems with the house via the survey. You calculate how much it'll cost to rectify the problems and remove that from initial offer. If you know of the problems before the offer then that's a different matter.

[AVB]

It's not devaluing the house. You offer on the thinking that the house is worth that much in good condition. You the find out the problems with the house via the survey. You calculate how much it'll cost to rectify the problems and remove that from initial offer. If you know of the problems before the offer then that's a different matter.

 

 

That's what I did very recently on a house I was buying. Survey came up with a list of snagging items at a cost of £2K and a potentially larger bill to deal with a drains issue. I took the £2K on the chin as they were relatively minor but the vendor got the drains fixed once I told them about it.