House sold months ago, buyers now want a

[Roseyliv78]

Hi all, wondering if anyone can give me some perspective…

We sold our house a few months ago and the buyers were fine up until last week. Out of the blue, they suddenly asked for £11k off a £300k purchase. They also apparently told our estate agent that, because we’re moving to a much bigger house, we can afford to give them a discount. We have no idea how they even got our new address, the estate agent says they definitely didn’t give it out.

The mortgage valuation guy said there were no down valuations at the end of the visit, and all the surveys came back fine, so nothing has come up to justify this. Our buyers said it was due to local area but the surveyor and bank surveyor both said it’s been extremely strong.

We obviously said no. We also offered to talk to the rest of the chain to see if the £11k could somehow be sorted that way, but they didn’t respond. Then they said they were disappointed we didn’t renegotiate, even though we had already negotiated properly at the time.

Honestly, we’re just a bit confused by the whole thing. Has anyone else had buyers suddenly try this months after the sale?

is this a classic attempt to try and give us a headache?

its strange as know they’ve paid all the legal fees, surveyor fees. Surely very risky as we could tell them to do one, and they could lose all the fees if we didn’t want to sell to them now.

allot younger then us as we both in our early 40s and our buyers early 30s don’t know if it’s a social media trend etc.

I got confused they’re FTB not you! Sounds like a classic case of entitled FTB trying to get a deal having watched too many Location location location!

We’ve had them round 6 times with family and measuring up etc

I had that. She said her dad had told her to do it 🙄

Happened to us, years ago. We took the Sold Subject to contract label off the for sale board and waited to see what would happen.
After a few drive pasts (with their mum) they changed their minds and paid the agreed price.
They were 'following advice', apparently. We're quite friendly with them now.

Make sure your estate agent tells them that they’re getting the house ready to relist and are going to open it up for viewings again as of next week, so they can exchange or accept that they’ve lost the money they’ve spent on legals and surveys if they don’t get a move on.

they’re bullies. Don’t give these tossers an inch.

my oh had this with his FMH in London - bloke wanted like £100k off, my OH (lied) and told him that the EA has passed this on to the STBXW and she (utterly batshit in every way and obviously so) had gone predictably batshit and had said that she didn’t want to sell the house to him under any circumstances or at any price as he’d offended her by his actions.
The ex wasn’t even told of this reduction, she would have flipped..

not another peep out of dickhead buyer, he exchanged days later

Don't be silly, what do you imagine OP would gain from that?

You are sadly mistaken if you think your house is sold. The buyers have made a non binding offer and you and everyone else in the chain has built upon that. Until you exchange, your house is not sold.

The buyers, who sound like utter shits, are only doing what is legally possible. Sorry this is happening but you must adjust your knowledge of the sale process to align with reality.

really hope your sale proceeds ok, and that the buyers later get scabies which is what they deserve.

What deadline have you set? You’re wasting time if they’ve been sitting on this for a week and a half. You need to put it back on the market and move on if they’re not serious now about buying it.

I know one person who did this (and he is a bit of a chancer) and the sellers just said a straight no, they're not taking any less for it. He went ahead with the purchase anyway, at the original agreed price - he was just trying it on.
These people are absolute CFs - never give in to them. Threaten to put the house back on the market, and push for a deadline for exchange.

Tell your estate agent to re-list first thing tomorrow morning, that sends a clear message, it will also get them scurrying back if they really want the place or if not, you had to do it anyway.

im confused
so the house isn’t actually sold yet?
Just say no, ask them if they want to continue with the sale, give them 24 hours to respond, at this point, state that you’ll be instructing the agent to re market.
You could equally say after the 24 hours period, it will be re advertised at £2k more.
They have already paid a fair bit in surveys at this point.
They may well have found another property, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

The house buying process in England really needs to change to the Scottish system .
Sold recently in Scotland we paid for house survey all viewers had access to this and house valuation.
Waited till a couple of notes of interest then goes to closing date for offers ,accept the best offer ,agree entry with buyers and that's it .Literally moved out 6 weeks after accepting the legally binding offer.House was done and dusted in 8 weeks total .There is even some guarantees that central heating etc works put into contracts .
English system was such a shock to us .
Constantly chasing everyone, threat of everything falling to bits before finally moving into house ,and we were cash buyers at bottom of chain .
English seller after accepting our offer phoned up asking if we would up our offer by £5000 as she had more interest than she thought she would have .
We told her either continue with our current offer or decline and we would move on .At no point did it occur to us to try to reduce our offer because it had been agreed between both parties .
Hold your ground that's a huge amount of money ,good luck

Best attitude and I would do the same. I know you'll lose out on your own survey costs but they are incredibly cheeky and puts a horrible shadow over the whole thing.
Moving home is one of the most stressful things going imo!

When was your completion date booked?

They want the house. They also just want to feel like they got a "good deal" or were "canny buyers."

This really pisses me off. A good deal is one where all parties go away feeling satisfied. It's not one where you've screwed everyone else for every last penny.

If the deal completes, I'd be leaving the house in a right old state (within the limits of the law, of course). And I'm someone who left our (lovely!) FTB a fully cleaned house and a bottle of champagne.

There should be a register of people who engage in such behaviour, so there are consequences. They hopefully then will have difficulty in other large sales or purchases, such as buying and selling a car.

You would need to have a process as to how people end up on the 'awful persons' register, but hopefully it would reduce such behaviour.

I suppose quite a few buyers think they might as well try it on, in case you’re mug (or desperate) enough to give in.

Has the market moved just looking at the Rightmove evaluations for my house? It was worth £14,000 more. Last June
So three months my account for some Movement in the market based on most recent house price sales going through
The worst thing you can do is a first time buyer is overpay for a house so I don’t blame them if they’re having a wobble

We has this happen to us in 2023 and it is such a lowlife scummy move on the buyers part.

Ours offered £10k less the day before exchange. Told the estate agent we should accept because we were desperate to move. Estate agent told them we were not desperate to move. They were massive dicks before this so we knew this would happen. They waited until the last minute to raise survey issues (that were the same issues as when we moved is common to all victorian houses. I amended the email but this is part if what we wrote

We priced the house fairly and competitively at £xk taking into account its condition. We don’t feel the issues raised are the kind of things that would warrant reconsideration of the asking price.

Equally, we cannot afford to drop the price due to the agreed price of our new house and our mortgage deal.

Due to the above, we won’t be able to reduce the asking price for the house. If you want to proceed it would need to be at the agreed price of £xk.
We realise you’ll need to think about this. If you could please confirm to estate agent at name of agency by close of business on date if you would like to proceed. If so, we can exchange this week and complete on date

dont budge on this they are taking the piss. Dont offer them to make it up along the chain. They can afford it they would not have been offered a mortgage otherwise. Chancers and also how creepy they found out where you are moving to.

There bank surveyor only come two weeks ago and said no down valuations etc.

20 years ago our purchaser, a young couple, asked for €25k off the day of exchange.

I was 8mths pregnant and saw red. Told the EAs if I did not have the contracts exchanged by 2pm that day there would be no sale to them ever. The EA attempted to talk me into negotiating and I told her she could either make it clear to the purchaser that there was no negotiating or the flat would be off the market. I don’t think I’ve ever been so furious.

they got it done but apparently I made the man’s life very difficult as he had to be pulled out of something important for some reason.

people are absolute arseholes

We got gazundered last time. Day of first exchange which was a Friday, he went AWOL for the weekend. Come Monday said his mortgage rate had gone up and needed £40k off. We knew it was bollox and he had planned it as offered full asking price to take house off market.

We negotiated with our onwards and both gave £15k so he got £30.

I was desperate to move so I don't regret it for a second.

A year later that house flooded..,..

But @District66that should all have been determined at the outset. Doing it at this point is immoral. If they don’t want it anymore for the price agreed then pull out and be done with it but once a price is agreed it’s a deal and you should honour the deal you made.

They think, "What are they going to do at this late stage? Call it off?"

To which your rely should be "Yep. If this is a dealbreaker for you, so be it."

They won't.

My mum, who has bought and sold quite a few houses over the last many decades, always says that house buying and selling brings out people's true character, and it's often not pretty.

In this case, your buyers are moneygrabbing chancers. That's their true character. The question they are asking you is, are you a gullible pushover? Is that your true character?

Don't be.

Our buyers did exactly the same. We just said no and they agreed to exchange at the original price.

put house back on market tomorrow. id even pay for social media boost via estate agent website. chancy fuckers. had this once and told estate agent to relist straight away. they backed down within an hour and best laugh was that house had actually increased in value since they had sale agreed. id have made more money relisting but not that much of a dick!