In this climate, how much less than asking price would you offer?

[QuintessentialShadows]

I have been looking at Findaproperty and Rightmove for houses in south west London.

I have realized that sometimes houses go for much much less than the asking prices, at least in some neighbourhoods. I have seen houses priced at £500,000 sold for £399.000 etc.

Currently found two lovely homes, one at 825, and the other at 840. This is above any hypothetical budget. (Planning to buy in the next 12 months). Also seen some at 725, and a more realistic one at 639.

What would be realistic to offer?

Well we're in south west but saw a property on saturday that was interesting. But I told the agent that we would be offering 20% under if we did make an offer but would need to do a second viewing.

However if this was going to be way too low then we wouldn't waste the vendor's time and agent has just called back to say please do a second viewing. The vendor would consider an offer in that region.

So for me I'm going in at 20% under any asking price.

Offer what you think the house is worth and you can afford. Do your research and find out what similar houses in similar condition have been selling for. Assuming a blanket x% under the asking price makes no sense because some agents price properties correctly and others over price them.

I imagine you could get a bargain with all the uncertainty around at the moment. We managed to get £15k (7%) off asking price in a desirable area.

I imagine in your price bracket you could do very well as the biggest bargains seem to be with the more expensive houses from what I can see...good luck!

You need to see lots of houses, use property bee, get a sense of what they are actually going for. We were looking for nearly 2 years before we found what we wanted at a good price - we recognised the asking price was low, and that was because the vendors had found their dream home and had to sell theirs very quickly before they lost it. We still started at 10% off (worth a shot), then 5% off was accepted. But we knew that was a good deal - if it had been priced as optimistically as the others we'd seen we would have offered a much bigger percentage off.

My fellow pickle gives good advice - there's so much in the mix when it comes to what somebody will accept - and it depends how much you want the house.

My house is on the market - I'm in no hurry to move and we're close to a good school. We've had lots of interest and we've turned down an offer. You're never going to get asking price but you have your "target price" and your "bottom line" price. The offer we had came in below the bottom line, so we refused it.

There are some bargains to be had - but - the house of your dreams may not fall into that category. We had some viewers who weren't in a chain and assumed we would take a very low offer because of their circumstances. When they viewed the house and realised we weren't in the market for silly offers, they were very upset becuase they'd fallen in love with the house.