It sounds like I’m in the tiny minority, but I agree with you, OP. Obviously, lots of people do have success with the method, but that doesn’t stop it being intrusive, or at the very least very ‘forward’. Possibly if it’s a very sparse “Should you ever happen to be interested, could you kindly give us a call” – but using words like ‘flagged’ or ‘identified’ is way too much, let alone going on to tell you the price they’re looking at paying (or the SP for a ‘negotiation’, which could end up way lower once they feel they have their foot in the door and maybe start negging your house).
The bit saying "we'd pay more than if you put it on the market" is a bit weird/rude.
No, they said they’d pay more than the recommended asking price. Popular houses and/or popular areas frequently sell for significantly more than the asking price, which is often just the starting basis for negotiation – usually upwards. Only getting the initial asking price (or slightly more) on a house which will attract a lot of interest almost always means that you’ve been unusually unfortunate or taken advantage of.
These days, it’s so easy to set up an alert on Rightmove and also notify the local estate agents of your genuine interest – then, when it comes up, make the highest offer. Not bothering to do either of these would lead me to strongly suspect that, in spite of your claims to the contrary, you were hoping to get it at a considerably lower price than if it were put on the open market.
Yes, we've also had similar ones to this, aimed to guilt-trip and pull at the heartstrings. Imagine writing that to an elderly/vulnerable person? It's someone's home already.
We recently sold the house of a deceased elderly relative who also had mental health problems. ‘Luckily’ for her, in her final years, she was bed-bound and unable to look after herself or deal with her own post; but before she reached that stage, if she had received that letter, she would have found it incredibly intrusive and it would have burdened her mind and worried her constantly that somebody was wanting her out of her house so that they could have it instead. Of course, at her age, she was clearly approaching the end of her life, so she would probably have also worried that they might have been planning to engineer her needing to leave her home – lying to get her sent to a care home…. or worse. Her fear would have manifested with her frequently (likely for years, multiple times every day) shouting up loudly, ‘responding’ to the voices in her head about ‘these Robinsons from Elm Drive who want to get rid of me and take my house from me’: a huge source of distress for her and, indeed, incredibly intrusive. Yes, you don’t know if the current owner has MH problems/anxiety/vulnerabilities – but you also have no way of knowing that they don’t.
The property shows on tv recommend that buyers do this.
They also tell people to get in with an early offer on condition that the house be taken off the market immediately. We had somebody try this with us – and the offer we went on to accept was £20K more than his (on a standard Midlands doer-upper). They’re doing it to give the buyers an advantage – they don’t care about the sellers.
Have you never had an estate agents printed version through your door, they do it all the time? Same thing.
Completely different. A standard impersonal printed letter to ‘Dear Littleford Homeowner’ that’s obviously been pushed through the letterboxes of hundreds of houses in the area by an estate agent touting for business is nothing whatsoever like a personalised (even handwritten) letter ‘to the owner of 62 Acacia Crescent’ and from a named individual/couple rather than with the local EA’s standard letterhead.
Someone once threatened to buy my house and I couldn’t go out for a week, I was so traumatised. I still have flashback of the offer even now.
Are you elderly and/or do you have paranoia or other MH problems? Do you maybe have an abusive and/or violent ex-partner with a history of playing mind-games with you, in an attempt to gaslight you or just keep you on your toes in continuous fear of him/her? Hopefully not, but spare a thought for others who may well not be quite as fortunate as you are.