Cheeky couples on Location Location Location

[Arbesque]

Just watched another episode where Bob and Lisa have been trying, for 2 years, to find a house within their 350k budget that meets all of their criteria.
Kirsty finds them one that has the 3 bedrooms, tick, big garden, tick, off street parking, tick and is in one of their preferred areas. It's on at 350k
Bob and Lisa love it and are beyond amazed that the perfect house in the perfect area, within budget, exists because in their 2 years of searching they have never one.

They decide to go in with a 'cheeky' (insulting) offer of 325. They are a bit miffed when this is turned down and up their offer to 330. Again, to their amazement this is turned down and the Estate Agent patiently explains that the vendors feel the asking price is fair.

Bob and Lisa very reluctantly up their offer to 340 and are shocked and hurt this is also rejected. They decide to 'walk away' and 3 months later are 'still looking' for their dream house.

No wonder, with that attitude.

If the house is worth it and you have the money just PAY THE ASKING PRICE and stop mucking everyone around.

I think the sort of person who’d go on the show makes this sort of thing more likely. If you have access to rightmove and live in the same region as the property you want to buy with a realistic budget, you are most of the way there. If you’re still house hunting after 60 viewings, want a 4 bed house in central London for £300,000 or are looking for a Georgian rectory in the Shetlands then almost by definition you’re going to be fussy.

I couldn't give a shiny shite what Bob and Lisa do.

The whole premise of the show is to seek out buyers who have struggled for ages to find a property. The reason is usually that they disagree between themselves about what kind of property to buy or what compromises to make. Kirsty and Phil don't magically find properties they couldn't otherwise find through estate agents or Rightmove. They're there to offer a third-party perspective and try and get them to agree. It's just marriage guidance with a property veneer.

DH got £50k off the asking price for our house. I was not happy with his haggling because they were obviously pissed off with us, but also divorcing and hated each other.

We moved in to find all 5 toilets filled to the brim with shit and a smoking pyre of their furniture in the garden.

Not worth it imo.

Actually I completely disagree. Asking prices are not set in stone, and it is not an insult to put in an offer. The times we have bought and sold houses were in the 90s, and first decade of this century (noughties?) and we only paid full price once (when there was a bidding war). Never sold for full price either. It was just normal.
We will be buying again within the next year or two and I have my saved properties list on Rightmove and there are many many price reductions, and houses showing 'sold', but then coming back on a few weeks later. The market is changing. I am in the Midlands BTW.

I’ve bought four houses and always managed to get between 10 and 20 thousand off asking price. It’s just standard to offer lower.

The housing market it a shambles... its like Ebay but non logical.

Asking price = buy it now
Offer = offer button (may or may not be accepted, to be honest most seller ask more than what its worth which is WHY this exists)
Auction = bidding obviously

but for some reason now people now 'bid' on asking price driving it up and up and up, houses with an straight up asking price of £72k will sell for £98k... it just make no sense, no other 'non auction' type sales work like that.

It is a business transaction.

clearly the couple in this case either got it wrong or didn’t believe the house was worth £350k to them.

that’s fine - but it’s when people try to play games and be smart that I get irritated.

I sold last year - thirty viewed and about five bidders. I had one guy try to explain why the house wasn’t worth the asking price - it sold for £20k over! He seemed to think his insightful analysis of the housing market would convince me to lose out on an extra £20k🤣.

the estate agent passed the message on while trying not to laugh.

They are right to walk away. Asking prices have no real measure against an index, it’s inflated by the agent as commission based and the greed of the seller.

You are looking at it very opaquely if you believe they should’ve bought as they may not have been able to afford the repayments if interest rates had risen etc. Lots of factors.

Bob and Lisa need some perspective therapy.

perhaps secretly they are scared of getting what they want.

Maybe they just wanted to be on the telly.

It's all made up fake bollocks though innit

I don't think people understand the valuation is for the property in the condition it is currently in.

Oh come on! @Wombat27A

Estate agents have only one aim - to sell a house. They are sharks.

They often price low if they need to reach their monthly sales targets, or high if they want a higher percentage of the sale and are willing to try it on and see if someone pays over the odds.

They sometimes bow down to the vanity of sellers who usually think their houses are worth more than they are. And of course they are quids in if the house sells for more than it is worth.

Bathrooms and kitchens are subjective. They can be functional, but still need ripping out if dated or tatty.

The best property show (imho) is My Lottery Dream House on the HGTV channel.
Its American but they always buy one of the houses they are shown and we get to see them a few weeks after they move in.

£25k under, when the valuation is fair, it's in your budget and you've been searching for two years?

I find it strange with all these types of programmes , house in the sun, places in the sun etc etc that they all go in with a budget find the perfect property and then walk away because the vendor wont go down 30 to 50K why say you have this amount to spend when clearly you haven't ?

I also get amazed at how many people go on Wanted Down Under, they live in a normal 3 bedroom semi in Smalltown UK and wonder why they can't get the Aussie dream in Sydney for the same money, with walk-in wardrobes and a pool, obviously.

If it was your dream house, fairly priced, under your budget and wouldn't have made much difference to the monthly payments, why did you initially go in at £10k under? Why not offer the asking price straight away?

To be fair, they do sometimes. I like "I Escaped to the Country" where they revisit to see what the buyers did with the house they bought, or where they ended up if they didn't buy any of the houses they saw on the programme.

Kirsty thought it was a bargain and you could see she was frustrated the couple were stubbornly refusing to go up to the asking price.

So Kirsty is an expert, not someone being paid to make a programme where they create tension and drama?

We bought our house 23 years ago in a red hot market and paid asking price. I bought my previous house three years earlier and got it for £5k under asking because the market then was a lot slower. The days of offers under are returning I suspect as the market cools.

If it was your dream house, fairly priced, under your budget and wouldn't have made much difference to the monthly payments, why did you initially go in at £10k under? Why not offer the asking price straight away?

Fairly priced is subjective.

Everyone knows that houses and 2nd hand cars are priced over their true value with the expectation of offers.

It's easy to see true values by using RM House Sales and comparing with other houses in the same road/area and adding on inflation or deflation, and demand.

Then why say your budget is 350k, if actually you are only prepared to spend 335k?

I had exactly the same. The house was on offer for £900k. Within hours we had multiple viewings and he offered at £880. Of course this was at the weekend so we did get all the offers in until the Monday. We turned down his offer and he increased by 1k, then again for another 1k. Apparently really disappointed and annoyed with us. The offer we accepted in the end was for £935k.. IF he had just offered the asking price in such a buoyant market (i think in fact it was slightly undervalued if anything judging by the response we got) he may have got a bargain. Twat.

Maybe the house wasn't worth £350,000 to them. In comparison to others they'd seen, or maybe there were alterations they wanted to do, so that needed to come out of their budget? Maybe they realised that they were pushing themselves too far to pay the top of their stated budget?

My favourite episode of LLL was a Scotland one. A couple wanted a very specific house - can't remember the details but it was akin to 'three bedrooms exactly, mature garden, a walk from central Edinburgh, must be Victorian or older and have high ceilings and buckets of charm. Budget 375k'. Phil and Kirstie found them contenders but they found miniscule fault with all of them and were being completely inflexible on their criteria. Anyway it ended up with them out of nowhere announcing that they'd bought a 5 bed newbuild in Bonnyrigg for 450 thousand and Kirstie was just hilariously pissed off with them for wasting her time.

They declared the house as being absolutely perfect, we could just move in etc. And Kirsty did seem genuinely frustrated.