AIBU to decrease house price offer?

[Onefortheroad1]

Our offer on a house was accepted in late summer. Since then obviously there has been a lot of upheaval, lots of mortgage offers pulled, rocketing interest rates and house price drops widely expected.

If you were buying would you seek to renegotiate and lower the price because we are not committed to buying yet and the economy has got significantly worse since our offer was accepted? Or do you just think this is part of home ownership and we should proceed as agreed.

If it makes a difference the sellers have lived there for a while and the value of the house has increased significantly so I think they are mortgage free so a lower offer won’t push them towards negative equity or a financial loss.

I want to be fair and reasonable to the seller but can’t afford to overpay as prices come crashing down.

People do.

Equally as shitty a thing to do

Mumsnet would (rightly) tell these people that they're bastards too.

Late summer means you may have a month or two left on you mortgage offer. Which will be at a significantly lower rate than current.

So you could drop your offer, lose the house and then have to find elsewhere, your offer expire and then end up on a much higher rate mortgage.

but yeah. Reduce your offer. See what happens.

If prices were expected to sky rocket over the next year or so would you be happy with them along you to increase your?

This

They are not your friend. it is a business transaction. It is of no concern to you whether they have lived there for ages/would be in negative equity whatever.

If you think that the house is worth less now, then offer less.

Between offer and exchange, the transaction is reliant on trust and not obligation. That means you're under no obligation to exchange or purchase at the price you offered. However, if you change your offer or mess around for grabby, selfish, untoward or unfair reasons then you'll demonstrate that you aren't trustworthy. The vendor will view you as untrustworthy and the agent will view you as untrustworthy. The vendor may well not only reject your reduced offer but refuse to sell to you at all. The agent may well not show you around other properties they have or, at the least, not give you preference or recommend you to other vendors - and, depending on where you live, some agents talk too. You really could be screwing yourselves with this.

If your mortgage rate has changed since you put the offer in then you may have some leg to stand on. Otherwise, nah, you don't get to profit to their detriment from the wider economy having a bitchfit. I don't know where you are but, where I am, property prices have not gone down and, even after the 2008 crash, by 2018 they were 40% higher than before the crash happened.

Yes it would. If op got a mortgage in principle then submitted mortgage application prior to dates going up they will hold it for 6 months as mortgage offer at that rate . Will cost more to have to redo that application as mortgage interests rates higher . House market is settling again

We have agreed a sale, but are yet to sell and are worried about being left alone taking the hit potentially. I still think it is a shitty thing to do. You did a deal, honour it.

OP's rate shouldn't go up so long as they're on the same product for the same property (so, a change of property value from say £300,000 to £290,000, provided it doesn't cross an LTV threshold shouldn't result in a new rate). I moved two weeks ago and we reduced our offer because of something in the survey and had to find this out before we reduced our offer in case they wanted us on the new rate (we managed to get our offer at 2.3% but would've jumped to 5.9% if we'd had to get a new offer so wouldn't have been worth the renegotiation in price). We were told that, in rare cases, a lender will change your rate but, in general, it remains unless you change the property, cross an LTV threshold or increase the amount you'd like to borrow.

I think that's pretty immoral but I'm sure lots of people do it. Do you want to be that person though?

Are you planning to sell the house next year? If not then why would the current predicted slight drop in house prices be a reason to drop your offer.
if the house is worth less your bank will tell you.

Had the same done to us. Still pisses me off now.

Shitty thing to do. Would you be happy to pay more if the situation was different and house prices are booming? If no, then I don't know how you can consider it the other way.

We're in the process of selling at the moment. If our buyers tried this I'd tell them to go piss up a rope. I'd rather lose my onward purchase (which is our dream home, so not a small thing) than give in to people who try tactics like that.

You have an agreement. Honour it. Don’t be a CF.

@Mummbles
Only if it's exactly the same amount and gets a mortgage valuation at right price of previous property

She'll be out of mortgage offer timescales potentially before new property completes if joining a new chain. Big risk to take.
Never piss off a vendor or the EA . They understand difficulties that can't be helped but not "taking advantage" greed. That's what this is...
The house market will settle back and even up again, continue rising but maybe at a slower rate nothing will be lost

We did it. However we pulled out from the initial offer. The house went back on the market for 10 days and the seller did not get an offer in that time. We made a lower offer which he originally declined but came back to us and accepted subject to singing contracts quickly. Our interest rate is only fixed for the next 6 months as we were porting a mortgage from a previous house. We still offered close to the market value a little below. Our initial offer was a lot over the house value as at the time of making the offer houses were selling like hot cookies. It was a shit thing but in the end we were prepared to loose this house and start searching again.

If you think the property is no longer worth what you offered for it then it’s not wholly unreasonable to seek to renegotiate - providing you are prepared to walk away if the vendors decide they no longer want to do a deal with you.

I would call your bluff, refuse to sell to you and let you lose your lower rate mortgage offer.

I had a stupid offer made during a dip in my house. Despite having other offers. EA warned the buyer that it was too low an offer
Even though buyer later kept contacting EA to raise her offer to me, I said I wouldn't accept any offers from her as I didn't consider her a serious nor trustworthy buyer. Heard some sun story about how it was house of her dreams...

And that was a buyer who hadn't had an offer accepted and sake progressed over a few months already. Which would be worse.

It’s a shit thing to do. Don’t be that cunt.

You misread what I wrote.

@Mummbles
You misread what I wrote earlier than that then

I was talking about if OP lose the sale on this house by pissing off the vendors then the context is she will lose her mortgage offer at that rate too for any other house, and it will be higher rate to redo a mortgage offer on a new property , to what avail? Don't there's as much in market to have huge choice of properties and to lose the house they want for greedy motive of taking advantage of a temporary dip

YABVU

You are not being fair or reasonable to the seller (whatever their financial position is).

They should tell you so do one, it’s unethical to do this 2 months in.