To tell gazunderer to do one?

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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.

Don't drop the price, let him buy the other one.

We had to negotiate too fairly late in the day because we had a structural survey done on top of the home buyers one and there was a serious damp problem. The seller was fine though, and we split the cost between us (the house was a do-up, so some issues were to be expected but this was a major damp issue). It's really shitty of your seller to resort to name calling. The EA should be putting a stop to it.

Asking to renegotiate price on the day of exchange and completion is such a complete cf move. As someone who has been through the stress of sale myself yes I would tell them to go do one.

The housing market is hot you will find another buyer quickly.
Also no need to feel bad about it, they agreed to the original price and had enough time to make their mind up before the day of exchange.

But I don’t automatically judge someone having an affair as being immoral without knowing the detail of their circumstances

and same with someone renegotiating

I don’t jump to… they are thoroughly immoral twats. You do 🤷‍♀️

The arguments being made in respect of significant changes in the housing market are irrelevant here. This man is simply citing a smaller, less desirable property as a false equivalent as 'justification' for why he should pay less for a bigger, more desirable one.

Like almost anything that you can buy, a bigger house/flat with features that most people find preferable will have a higher achievable value than a smaller, less desirable house/flat.

If you are happy with, can only afford or personally prefer the cheaper house, then you would go for it; if you prefer the bigger/'better' one and can afford it, you would probably choose to buy that one.

Food prices have also gone up across the board recently, but as part of the same market principle, a larger pack of a more premium brand will still cost more than a smaller pack of a more basic brand. Why is this surprising?

@Inkpotlover Thanks. I'm buying it as a single person and tbh, I was nearly ready to walk away over being called 'disgusting' - then I realised that I too was about to react emotionally! So I am going to have a good think and sleep on it and check the maths. If the seller still won't negotiate, then I may have to chalk it up to a bad experience and start all over again - which admittedly really does make me feel down in the dumps, but I have my sensible head on.

But I don’t automatically judge someone having an affair as being immoral without knowing the detail of their circumstances

and same with someone renegotiating

I don’t jump to… they are thoroughly immoral twats. You do

Fair enough, then; we clearly have different moral perspectives on both of these (and possibly other) scenarios.

I'd tell them to walk and that you will be seeking recompense for any out of pocket expenses incurred so far

Call their bluff.
Let them walk.

I think suddenly changing the price on the day of exchange is a bit different to 1. Negotiating the lower price in the beginning or 2. Offering less based on unfavorable results of structural surveys or anything like that. This guy is definitely a CF. How would he like it if you suddenly wanted 20k more?

I have no problem with a buyer trying to renegotiate the price if, for example, the survey throws up problems. Leaving it to the day of exchange and completion, however, is not negotiating. It is attempting to bulldoze the seller.

As I said in my answer to your question, if a house that was genuinely identical to a house I was buying became available at a significantly lower price before exchange of contracts, I would consider pulling out of my purchase and going for the other house. I would not leave it to exchange and then demand a price reduction. And I certainly would not do what a previous poster suggested - make an offer with the intention of trying to force the price down shortly before exchange.

No, it might be legal, but it’s shitty behaviour. It’s not uncommon for a whole chain to collapse as a result, causing stress and considerable extra expense to buyers and sellers who aren’t even part of this negotiation.

It came very close in parts of London.

I used to live in Croydon. My house was valued at £87.5k in late '86. I decided not to move, because I got offered a job in London that I really wanted, stayed another 5 years, then relocated to Sussex.

I had the offer of a really good flat to rent, so rented the house out for a year. I finally sold at the end of '92 for £49.5k, which wasn't much more than half its 1986 valuation.

And I was lucky to get that. I sold to my NDN's daughter, who really wanted to live next to her parents. I probably would have had to let it go for less if I'd had to find a buyer on the open market. I'd bought it for £24k in '82, so had a decent amount of equity, and bought for £300 more than I sold, so it was no big deal, but people who'd bought at the height of the market in early'88 could easily have lost 50% of the value.

@Dustyourselfoff - sorry. Second paragraph of my last post referred to a question from another poster, not you. Getting my posters mixed up!

Iwasafool and Feefooo This was a few years ago when the original buyer should have known better than to walk away and expect a 1 bed garden flat in a very nice area of north London to be still sitting there 2 weeks later. Or I think he thought I might find a buyer but because “everyone needs a mortgage” he could swoop in and offer a lower amount for a quick sale.

I could never tell whether he was naive or arrogant

Good idea to sleep on it, but if it's something structural that prevents you getting Buildings Insurance you have to dig your heels in on the seller meeting you halfway. If they still refuse to negotiate after they've been presented with the facts – because if you can't get BI, no other buyer is going to! – then def walk away.

I have been following this thread all day and am still so angry at this CF!

However with this being a retirement flat it is a completely different kettle of fish to an ordinary flat.

Ignore me if this is not remotely relevant as my experiences were pre Covid plus even on this thread it seems that desirability of these properties varies massively by location but we were looking for something we thought would be suitable for our parents for several years and we thought that one of these retirement villages/complexes would be ideal.

What an eye opener we had! Googling reviews for McCarthy Stone it was just horror story after horror story and the others, while not so bad, really were not great either.

In our area the same flats sat month after month without selling, new ones would be added and they'd just sit not selling either and their prices would be reduced again and again and they still just would not sell.

As I said, we didn't just look for a few months, we shopped about and viewed various for a couple of years and many of these perfectly nice flats still didn't sell in that time. Several were offered for rent instead but always ended up back up for sale a few months later with yet another price reduction.

OP, you will know if that's the case for pre owned retirement flats in your area but you also said the other cheaper flat has been on the market since March.

I really, really don't want you to sell to this chiseler but if there is the slightest chance that he might be the lesser of two evils it might be worth considering even though it's about broken my heart typing those words?

That's why you need to study the market isn't it. Buyers markets and sellers markets are such very different things. At the moment I think it varies round the country, maybe reflecting rises over the past few years. I mean where I am we had very sharp rises over the past two years and now it is falling fast. Might be in some areas the rise wasn't so much and the fall isn't either.

He wasn't a good judge of the market at the end of the day.

What happened today OP? Did you exchange or relist?

Another vote for telling them to do one. They pay the asking price, or they take the inferior flat, their choice. I'm not in the UK, but can't imagine someone doing this on completion date where I live, it just wouldn't happen.

Annoying when it happens isn't it. We did do well on our next house as that area was struggling even more than where we were selling and the owners were moving abroad, well the husband/dad had already gone and family were desperate to follow. We offered the max we could not expecting to get it but we did. It was as good a buy as the first one was bad. Swings and roundabouts.

If you immediately jump to assuming someone is throughly immoral for having an affair without knowing why of their circumstances… then there’s no “possibly” about it! 😂

I have bought and sold since the 1980’s I have never known property to halve in value, so rather silly example. But fits in well with your username

At its peak our house was worth about £250,000. We had a £150,000 mortgage.

We sold for £125,000 and asked the Building society if we could port the £25,000 negative equity on to our next house as we had to move for work.

Building society wrote back and said yes we could do that. We put the house up for sale on the Monday and got a buyer within minutes. We exchanged the following week and were moving out 2 weeks after that.

This was pre mobile phones and pre internet.. The day of completion I got a call from the solicitors to say that the house had completed I put the phone down and the phone rang again and it was the Building society saying they were rescinding their offer and we couldn’t sell. Informed them they were too late as we had just completed. They said they would call me back. (Not on this home phone they wouldn’t )
Did actually approach them about a mortgage and getting them to port the money we owed on to the new mortgage but we got turned down.

Never did pay that £25000 back. They did ask years later but I replied with an SAR request particularly the original signed mortgage agreement and never heard from them again.

Definitely resist if you're able to wait.

If it struggles to sell, I'd still rather to sell it to someone else for 20k cheaper.

Relist*