To tell gazunderer to do one?

[Mustnotbeleftblank]

Selling a probate property, due to exchange and complete today. Agreed price was £20k less than asking/previous purchase price and included all furniture. Ours was the show home apartment, and another was put on the market which is empty, much smaller and in a less favourable, dark and dingy aspect at £20k lower than our agreed price 🙄 this flat is with an EA who persistently undervalues these properties which is why I did not use them.

Received a call from our Estate Agents yesterday. Buyer still wants our apartment but now wants to pay the same as the cheaper, crappier one or he'll withdraw and buy the other apartment. I am properly pissed, but offer £10k off to get it past the line.

Buyer is firm, £20k less or he'll walk.

I think the buyer is trying their luck, the other property was marketed in March. I've seen the buyer at the building whilst clearing out the property, I know they've been to look at the other flat long before this week and I suspected that he would try something like this at the last minute. I am also confident it's our flat he wants, just at the crap flat's price.

I've made them wait for my response, and having slept on it I am of the mind to hold firm on the £10k drop, requiring immediate exchange to stop him dicking about, or deal's off. If he walks, I will still have the property to remarket as well as all the furniture the buyer wanted included in the sale which will cover fees to date, and he'll have taken the competing property off the market.

AIBU to not reduce further and wish them luck with the other property if they withdraw, or do I suck up losing £20k?

Selling a property in England sucks.

“The buyer is trying his luck”

only on mumsnet is this a sin. In RL, it’s just negotiating

Oooh well done for standing firm OP. We had this nonsense in our unbelievably difficult chain. The bottom of chain gazundered right at the end and we all took the hit throughout the chain, cost us about £2 each I think. I'm still angry now but we just weren't in a position to pull out of the sale for various reasons.

Do keep us updated! Good luck.

Come on, of course anything can happen or arise before the point of exchange, but this kind of shameless behaviour is pure bad faith: planned all along when making the original offer deceitfully.

It may be shameless but it's completely legal and not uncommon. That's why the English model of buying and selling is such a stressfest. Rule #1: everybody lies, including your own estate agent.

OP may find her buyer's behaviour immoral (and I agree) but she needs to set the outrage aside in deciding the most prudent course of action.

One other consideration @Mustnotbeleftblank - if there are multiple beneficiaries, I would think about how much each of them is likely to lose if you were to accept the lower offer. If the hit gets diluted by a large number of parties, it makes even less sense imo to be guided by your anger at the CF buyer, however justified.

It's getting to that point in the day where it may soon be too late to conclude the transaction anyway, so good luck, OP, whatever you decide.

Hasn’t the buyer paid a deposit based on a contractually agreed price?
I wouldn’t sell to a business. I’d pull the sale from the EA too so they won’t get their cut - clearly they are not acting in your interests - you need to tear a strip off them.

London! It’s going live next week.
sorry you’ve had that happen, it’s absolutely crappy, I always hated everything to do with buying and selling.

This, call his bluff

I agree. Retirement flats are notoriously difficult to sell. Don’t get too carried away with bullish behaviour. It would be better to come to an agreement half way with this buyer you have.

Many also don’t allow you to let the property either.
In my SE very popular market town there are quite a few sitting on the market. Those that do want to buy often go for the brand new offerings.

Many here who are encouraging you to stick firm aren’t necessarily taking into account that it’s a retirement property and all that they entail. Making comparisons to other sales is like comparing apples and tomatoes.

You have a potential buyer who it would be best to sensibly negotiate with.

Ok stupid question coming - we were FTB last year and I'd never heard of gazundering until we were in the market... I've added it to my list of fears. How does this happen if a mortgage with a set LTV has been already approved? If the buyer pays less than agreed, their LTV has changed? Unless the conveyancer asks the mortgage lender to change the loan amount? Is it something only cash buyers do?

Good luck OP, this is really awful behaviour on the buyer's part.

What's kind of interesting (from an outside perspective anyway) is that things like this are a strong signal that the market is shifting from sellers to buyers having the upper hand. In a marketplace where there are many buyers, an individual buyer can't get away with things like this. It's an insight into market psychology.

Sellers probably aren't going to be too happy at losing the upper hand (especially not when you read this thread).

But they have been enjoying unearned gains and high prices from property for years, maybe even the best part of a decade. Seems a bit churlish and pretty greedy to me to complain when the advantage shifts to the other side after so many years.

I appreciate it is a stressful time and process and not great for the individual. But this sort of stuff happens at a time of market adjustment.

I find it very hard to find sympathy with sellers in general when buyers who have been priced out for years (while sellers have gained) get their moment in the sun and decide to leverage it.

If you were buying my property and you tried this, I would tell you that I was putting my property back on the market and I wouldn't sell to you at any price. Making an offer you have no intention of honouring is not "playing hard ball", it is being dishonest.

Not a sin. But you're not obliged to facilitate. It is ok to say no and stand firm.

I think this and other posts explain why the property market is so "sticky".

It's full of non professsional negotiators who don't understand how markets work and will hold out for the price they want, even if they are faced with an obvious market signals such as an affordability crisis (rising interest rates)

This is going to lead to sticky, unrealistically high prices, and ever thinning transaction volumes.

If the herd ever comes to the conclusion the game is up though, the rush for the exit is going to be absolutely spectacular.

Exactly

it’s also personal and emotional

Which often results in cutting one’s nose off to spite the face

The time for negotiating is after viewing and before instructing the conveyancing solicitors, to agree a mutually acceptable price. A further time for negotiation is upon receiving the results of the survey, if the survey highlights some expensive issues. To renegotiate on the exchange and completion date is really unfair. In op's position I'd refuse to deal with them.

It's a dirty, sneaky, trick.

I accepted a lower offer from first time buyers for my first house. On the understanding that exchange and completion would be fine within 8 weeks. They had a useless solicitor (he was annoyed that he was dealing with my solicitor because she was a young woman, but also more senior than him at a rival firm). After 10 weeks I gave them an ultimatum. Exchange and complete by X date or I would relist the house (I have them 14 days, all questions and searches had been dealt with for over a week at this point). Their solicitor thought I wouldn't pull. The estate agent had to call up the buying solicitor and the buyers to explain that I was not in a chain and had multiple other offers I could go back to that matched/ were higher than them (not by much but I preferred to sell to FTBs than a buy-to-let person if the difference was only £2k). I was deadly serious about relisting, and mysteriously the buyers solicitor suddenly got his thumb out and exchange and completion was done in time.

Or… another interest rate, more bad news for the housing market being reported widely yesterday… and he thought that he would renegotiate based on new situation

No.

Negotiation takes place when the offer is put in, and there may be a little bit of back and forth to agree a price, which may change after survey.

Springing this sort of "surprise" at this late juncture isn't negotiation. It is blackmail.

And presumably it hadn’t been the show home for some time if the now deceased had been living there.

In your opinion that is the timing parameters of negotiation

but the law thinks otherwise

there was an interest rate raise yesterday, and dire announcements re the markets. He had new info. He responded to that new info

This hasn’t gone to exchange yet

And the Op makes no indication whatsoever how far along the sale was.

no mention of survey or legal costs. Nothing

They were due to exchange and complete today.

Well they were due to exchange and complete today so I think we know. Some horrible people on MN these days. Every thread seems to turn into a torrent of spite and bile.

Ah my mistake