Aibu to write to the house seller?

[ButterMelonCauliflower]

Long story short… we have sold our house but nowhere to buy. We want to stay local and understand the local housing market.
There’s a house we like but it’s out of our price range. We think it’s over-valued (massive development planned next door to the property - probably why owners are selling). The agent it’s on with has a reputation for overvaluing and the vendors are asking way more than local average increase in the 10 years that they’ve owned it. They tried to sell 2 years ago but failed. Since then the asking price has gone up for no obvious reason.
Two weeks ago we offered 18% below asking price and were rejected.
Yesterday we offered 15% below but agent says they are not willing to negotiate.

AIBU unreasonable to contact them, explaining that we love the house, are not trying to take the piss and are hoping they might reconsider?

YES you are BU. It’s their house and they can ask what they like

NO you are not BU. A letter can’t hurt as long as it’s not too bossy/pushy

Any thoughts?

Sometimes I feel it could be helpful, in this situation I don’t think it will.
The sellers and EA are trying to continue to support the inflation of the market and get well more than they are asking for.
The letter won’t help cause they know they are being a CF.
I would just wait patiently, it will backfire on them and they won’t sell. Most people don’t have the money anymore to join in on the market atm.
The vendors will learn hard way.

Obviously one will sell at best possible price
Not just sell because of a schmaltzy letter asking for a reduced price because op can’t afford the ask price

What?

The housing market is inflated, the growth on these homes is unnatural. You can ask what you want, doesn’t mean you’ll get it.

Also I didn’t tell the Op to write the letter.
Some Vendors do like to sell their family home to a family over an investor. Where a letter could be helpful

Price is what the buyer will pay. Seller is not compelled to sell at low price, why would they?
A schmaltzy letter is really cheeky subterfuge to get a price reduction

Do it. We did and it worked for us. Turns out the agent was utter shite and not passing all offers on.

This. You may offend the vendor. I had someone try to bypass my agent, write to me and then turn up on the doorstep. I couldn't get rid of him fast enough. People employ an agent for a reason.

I sold to someone else after that.

Excuse me?
You’ve gone to the very last post of this thread and decided to randomly quote me, even though I just echoed the sediment of 90% of the posters on here to explain what exactly?
Maybe quote the Op and ask her why her research is telling her the house is over the
market value for the area? Ask her to explain herself.
You’ve also not quoted anyone else or the posters who told the Op to do it. Maybe ask them why they feel that she should do it?
The only person being ‘abusive’ well bullying right now is you.

I think if the house hasn’t sold in so long, they might not be overly interested in moving until house prices rise. I am seeing many houses sitting on the market, reduced or relisted in my area because people believe their house is now worth XYZ - in reality, houses are worth what people can afford or are willing to pay.

As a seller I wouldn’t be offended by a letter, but if I were you I’d just tell the EA that’s your offer and keep looking. The seller can take it or leave it.

No dont don’t do it. It’s highly unlikely they will see their wrongdoings and more likely you will piss them off. Hopefully if they get no further offers/viewings they will accept your offer.

You may have decided that they are chancers and time wasters but house valuations aren’t an exact science and people do buy houses at 10% less than asking, the last 2 houses I bought were, one in 2002 and one in 2023. Both were similar though, needed a lot of work and priced optimistically and given they both accepted about 10% off I guess they were aware and decided to try the market, saw they would need to drop to sell and did as it achieved what they wanted from the sale, as we did when we sold as getting moved to a different area was worth more to us than a certain amount of money.

You can’t generalise about sales too much as a lot of different factors come into play depending on the circumstances of the seller. Friends of mine accepted 550k on house up for 600k last year as were buying something else and had a bridging loan People we bought from were retiring early, had inherited the house , were happy for it not to be turned into flats and were pragmatic about the price.

The difference between these cases and the OP is all were prepared to negotiate but the vendor of the one the OP is interested had said a firm no which is why I personally wouldn’t write to them but we are all different and OP may decide to.

Write. Expect nothing.

Yes, I'd write a letter.

It's NOT a bad thing to lay out just how much you love the house - it shows you're serious and wouldn't pull out at the 11th hour or risk pissing about.

Keep in mind they might be tricky sellers though. Have they found an onward purchase? I'd be concerned they're not serious about moving.

I don't think prices will rise rapidly uniformly but there are definite areas of the country where this is happening. I visited one last week and it was tangible how different this market was compared to my home town market which absolutely isn't rising.

I am very wary of people like Mark Tabrett. I notified that some of his data was used to inform a Telegraph article which simultaneously claimed that house prices have been dropping in real terms since 2009 and were also in a 'bubble'. Mark seems to claim that housing prices have been overstated for over a decade and it's not a new phenomena. Again this could quite possibly be the case but he seems to be claiming that property was never worth what people believed and figures are being massaged to manipulate current house price data upwards to show an artificial rise.

I had a seller keep trying to pass me info, via a mutual acquaintance and it was so annoying and intimidating because they were trying to change my mind. I walked away from the sale, it's never a good idea to bypass the EA.

That’s quite literally how the housing market works, most of the time you put it in for £X, knowing you’d accept £Y. If you put the house on for the price (£Y) you’d accept you likely won’t get it as people always want to buy for less than asking. I’m not sure you know as much as you think.

I have already agreed with you on the first point.

Re Mark Tabrett, the ONS have publicly down adjusted all their data so it isn't a case of him claiming anything. The ONS figures also keeps adjusting their recent figures for a year plus as standard but the downwards revisions have been more greater in the past couple of years or so. This can be confirmed on their website. I suspect he is right about the motivation. Certain narratives are extremely unhelpful and house price falls is one. The same deliberate manipulation of data wrt economic indicators has been going on in the US. We will see what happens over the next few years.

I would be very wary that, if somebody offered low and was rejected and so they revised their offer up significantly, their tactic would just be to get their foot in the door, with the full intention of finding or engineering a way to get the price back down to what they wanted to pay much further along the line.

YANBU, I had buyers like this; chip chip chip with trying to renegotiate and I had to threaten via the agent that I wouldn't sell to them at any price if they didn't pack it in.

I was delighted to see they made zero (taking into account stamp duty) when they sold 3 years later, because their "upgrades" looked shit. Couldn't happen to a better pair.

it shows nothing of the sort.....could as easily show that the writer is an annoying whiney CF.

Don’t do this. If it’s meant to be your home then they’ll come to their senses and reduce the price. For now, just keep looking and you may find something you like even better.

Edited to say- This is my tactic on Vinted. Put in a cheeky offer on things that have had little interest and just wait. It has about a 60/70% success rate with the seller either reducing or coming back to me with a counter offer when they realise I’m the only one who’s interested.

Wait 6 weeks, if its still on the market offer again at the same price. You could write the vendors a letter but do it via the agent.