Buying a repossessed house

[orchardlime]

Has anyone done this, and if so, did you manage to knock the buyer (i.e. the bank) down on the asking price?

A property next to ours is for sale (at much less than we paid for our own, purchased in 2007), and we're thinking of buying it to rent out - but can only afford to do this if we can negotiate a lower price than they're currently asking because we'd need to release equity from our main property in order to help raise the deposit.

It's in a bit of a mess and will need some work, so we'll need to factor in the cost of renovation - nothing structural.

tia

I've never bought a repo but bear in mind that the bank have a legal obligation to get the best possible price for the former owner as, if the debt is not covered by the sale price, the ex-owners will still be liable for the difference (and, of course, all the admin costs and charges).

Thanks - I don't think buyers are queueing up for it as it's been on the market for a while.

We could afford to wait to see what happens. I hadn't realised the ex-owner would be liable for the difference.

Go onto Zoopla.com and see what it was last sold for and it will give some indication of what the sellers are trying to recover and put in an offer in relation to that.

It will only give an idea of what they paid for it - if they remortgaged it or took out a business loan against it, that could be where they ended up in trouble.

We bought our first house as a repo in 1995.

In the first instance we were in a bit of a bidding war, which we won. We then got a full structural survey done as the house was 1880s Victorian terraced and we knew a lot needed doing. After the survey we got estimates for the work that needed doing and knocked loads off our offer. From memory we dropped from £35 offer to £25k! (seems funny writing that now, so cheap!).

As it was a repossession they have to carry on marketing the property and before we completed they had another higher offer. They came back to us and asked us to increase and we were back into bidding war #2. In the end we gave our final offer and made our position very clear. The other buyers hadn't had a survey and didn't know the extent of the work needed and we were sure they'd reduce their offer once they found out (needed LOADS doing). We ended up buying it at £27k :)

Was rather stressful though!

I agree that it is only an indication and there is no way of knowing about re -mortgaging but it's a start.

We bought a repossession and it went to a closed auction. We got the house but it had been completely stripped by the bailiffs, down to door furniture, light fittings, etc. It had been blacklisted and we had a few issues with debt collectors turning up but that was easily remedied.

Many thanks everyone, great advice

Why not just try to negotiate? You're in a strong position as you're under no time pressure; you don't have to move; and you don't even have to buy it if the price is wrong!