Is anyone else trying to sell a house and feels like poking themselves in the eye with a sharp stick?

[Pinkjenny]

House has been on the market since July. We have changed estate agents, which obviously made no difference as it's not a new instruction. Am sick of it all, sick of the pointless viewers, sick of the useless feedback, sick of always being pipped at the post, sick of the market, sick of my house.

"Laugs - when this estate agent came to take the pics, she moved all kinds of toys/books etc. I said to her, 'That's fine love, but the house won't look like this when people come and see it.' "

So, do you want to sell your house, or live in it?

Reread the thread, and your attitude, and it may soon become apparent to you why your house have not sold.... (or, I fear not)

An agent who wants to take MORE photos to sell your house, and give you a second chance to show it at is best point, to get viewers to WANT to come through your door, is gold dust, in my opinion.

We're trying to sell our flat and have already dropped it a fair amount from when it first went on. EA keep telling us to drop it more if we want to sell and I can see their point. Like DBA said, a house is only worth what someone is willing to pay. BUT, I don't think the price is really the problem. Are estate agents really trying to tell me that potential buyer would not put in an offer ? even a low one ?if they were interested? Everyone buying at the moment knows what state the market's in, and is looking at houses they can't afford on the basis that they can make a low offer. Anyone who walks into my flat will instantly knock at least 10% of the asking price, if not more. But it seems to me there's no point reducing price when nobody's even looking!! I would accept an offer, but we're not getting any viewings and no offers, not even daft ones. People just aren't buying.
It's very very annoying

Quint - I'm going to ignore the tone of your post, but say that dh agrees with you. It's just such a bloody faff.

My attitude is bad, I concede. I'm taking the whole thing rather personally after 10 months on the market.

And fwiw, my house is lovely.

Pinkjenny, if it helps as a buyer I don't care about a little mess or clutter (as long as there's not so much that I can't see what sort of flooring there is!) I'm not buying your furniture or any of this lifestyle bollocks estate agents try to pedal. I'm not going to buy your house just because you've lit some scented candles and artfully arranged some twigs in a vase and removed anything personal from the rooms.

"The thing is the properties in question are not selling for the asking price. They are not selling but sitting on the market unsold and encouraging further unrealistic pricing from others."

This is my experience too. We have the proceeds of our sale in the bank earning bugger-all in interest, but I don't care to buy. Everything I see (in London zone 2) is overpriced by 15-25%, and isn't selling. Or it's going under offer, but to people in such long chains the offer is meaningless. So much for the newspaper headlines and "foreign investors". I'm renting a beautiful house and it would cost twice as much to buy as it does to rent, so not much incentive for us to move.

Hi OP just add a ray of hope, we have sold our flat and are moving next month.
I have 3 preschoolers so feel your pain re tidying ect.
We accepted an offer below valuation and did approx £3000 of tarting up before marketing the flat.
I decluttered everywhere and did dress it like a show home as much as possible.
I did the viewings myself and DP and kids were banished to the park.
Good luck hope you get the right viewer soon.

DoesBuggerAll

It's not what I 'think' has changed since 2009. It's a fact - there's a lot less uncertainty - people understand the issues now. AND interest rates are at 0.5% - it'll be years before they go back up to what people took their mortgages out at pre 2009 - that's a lot of extra cash floating about for a lot of people for a long time.
I'm not giving you 'opinion', I've seen 6+ houses in the area I'm looking in go on the market at £40-50k more than other houses sold for in the same streets in 2009, and they're sold and other houses are still selling today, and within 5% of asking price.
I don't know where you're based - it's well known there are huge regional variations in house prices and job security/availability - but in SE London, this is the current situation.
The national media and 'surveys' are not reflecting local truths. The worst of the redundancies hit my sector in London at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010 - it's been getting slowly better since then.
Like you (and you seem to have a lot of readymade doom-laden prophecies so conveniently to hand) lots of journos want to talk the market down - in the end, like Roy Walker says, you have to say what you see and what you're saying is just what you are hoping for rather than what is. The panic and fear you're putting out are over - it's just a very long slow walk back.
And unfortunately, for the journos, and hopeful homebuyers always hoping for the crash, it's not going to come just by wishing it.
People have too much of their lives invested in property just to throw their arms up in the air, go 'woe is me', and chuck it all up. It's not happening that way and there's no evidence that it's going to either.
I see Nationwide are offering 95% mortgages again

Runforfun - we were in exactly the same situation as you, no viewings at all, and the estate agent saying drop the price. But we got some outside advice, which was that the pics weren't doing it justice. So we decluttered some more (there's a whole sofa in storage now) and paid a photographer. Result, loads of viewings. Photos can be the key, esp if people are likely to be moving from out of the area.

LtEve - Zoopla works well on an estate with similar houses, but isn't always ring. On our road, all the houses are different, and one or two are big, the others are cottages, but all terraced. And it just can't see that at all, so it gets the prices of the big ones very wrong.

Fimbo - no, we're in the SW. But at least you know they're not the only ones...

I'd like to join your club too. Been on market since July, wasn't even pregnant then, baby no two now due in 7 weeks!
having now done all eth damp proofing/tanking on downstairs.....(reason first buyer pulled out) we now hav ethree offers on table, varying from full asking to 310k less. We'd accepted the lowest one, but then her buyer pulled out and so now all three offers on ours are from people who still have to sell theirs.
I HATE all the tidying etc. The 6 weeks we had of waiting for our buyer to try to find a new buyer were so nice. I didn't have to worry about viewings at all. Husband doesn't seem to understand.
Having a new baby constantly attached to me come this July and a crazy toddler does not a good 'house selling' scenario make.
Aghhhhhhhhhhhh.
Oh for that elusive chain free buyer.....

Oops - that '3', in '310K' was supposed to be a '£'
We are not selling a Million pound mansion!! (would that be any easier I wonder...?)
£10k to us is as you can imagine, rather a vast amount of money. Still, for someone who can actually procede, it would be worth losing that now.

I work in an estate agent, and in defence of our industry, I would like to point out that the vendor decides the price, not the agent.

We get vendors who refuse to listen to our advice, but insist on us marketing their house at a price they will never achieve.

We find it as depressing as you do. :)

Do you get no training in how to approach people and make a convincing case for a reasonable price? (You are salespeople after all)

I'm a chain free buyer! Pity nobody wants to sell their house to me, not even the couple who've been on the market since summer 2008, and had two sales fall through. We've offered 7.5k under asking and just got a flat rejection.

I agree Zoopla doesn't always work. In our last road there was a house that for some reason was registered with the sale price at more than £ 60k over the general guide price at the time. Not quite sure why the buyer paid that !

According to Zoopla that house is now worth over £ 100k more than the same style houses in the road based on that sale price. Naturally it isn't, in fact it would probably be worth less than some as others have extended or added a conservatory.

There is also the case of a pair of semis in the same road. Both have a conservatory, one has a slightly bigger garden. The first one was last sold in 2005 for £ 300k. Zoopla now values it as £313k. The other one (with the bigger garden) was last sold in 2007 for £ 322k. Zoopla now says it is worth £ 282k. So you have a difference of £ 31k just based on previous sale prices. And yes the houses are both in the same excellent condition.

But if you went purely by Zoopla there is a huge difference. Which isn't justified.

At the end of the day the house it only worth what you want to pay for it.

mathanxiety I work in a small family firm. We are nothing like the big nationals, we are very nice. :)

We do of course try to persuade vendors to be sensible. As in any situation, some people won't be told.

Sushiqueen - the house we rent was bought for double what the other similar houses on the street went for. In this case it's because they want to knock down the house eventually and redevelop the land behind. Maybe the house you mentioned has something similar? Cases like this are the reason zoopla is generally crap

greentown, I'm not spreading fear and panic nor telling it how I want things to be. I'm dealing in facts.

FACT: My company has shed staff
FACT: several friends and school acquaintances have been made redundant
FACT@ Many of these people are highly educated and at the top of their game and have never been out of work.
FACT: The banks are not lending anywhere near as much and house sales are down to less than half the long-term average.
FACT: Inflation is 4-5%+
FACT: People have far less disposable income (remember most people are not paying 0.5% on their mortgage. Most are on fixed rates or SVR not BofE rate trackers. In general people are not benefitting to any great degree from the low BofE rate.
FACT: Household incomes have suffered the longest sustained fall since the 1870s - a leading economist came out with this the other day - in the Telegraph I think.

I do not doubt that there are areas and instances where houses are selling for near or greater than the inflated asking prices but the presence of a few greater fools doesn't alter the entire market.

In any market if a house is priced correctly for that time and the condition/location of the house then it will sell. If it doesn't sell it was overpriced for the conditions, end of.

Tyler - no just bog standard new build estate houses. none of them more than 10 years old (so no big gardens :) ) Think it may be because she did a deal to get extra funds released to buy othe properties. All a bit dodgy initially I think.

DoesBuggerAll

1. Fact - so? your point is? we are just emerging from recession.

1. Fact - in what way are your specific friends relevant to the price of houses?

1. Fact - educated + at top of game!? again, what has this to do with anything?

4 & 5 Facts - nobody is disputing house sale VOLUMES are lower at inflation is high -- are they going to carry on down or are they on the way back up? You don't know but you clearly want them to go down hence the persistent doommongering

6 Fact - this is just opinion --- MOST are on fixed or SVR - you do not know this!!!

7 Fact another great Torygraph story - not a fact but an OPINION

So people buying at the market price in a given area, right price and right time, condition/location are FOOLS are they?

Go and grow up luv! stop swallowing housepricecrash.com verbatim

end of!

agree with a couple of the other posters that it's not always about just reducing the price to sell a property, especially at the upper end of the market.

in the 18 months we've been on the market we have had offers on ours from 3 different buyers at the IMO realistic price (about 10% cheaper than anything else similar that's on the market) but each time it's fallen through because of mortgage problems or chain problems - nothing to do with the price.

Exactly what's happened with us. If there was no such thing as a chain, we'd have been out of here a long time ago!

I think it's fairly well accepted that if you are getting feet in the door to take a look but no offers you are probably 5%+ overpriced, and if you are not even getting viewers then you are probably 10%+ overpriced.

You are also more likely to get chain problems at the top end of the market so price isn't the only factor there, but chain problems likely come from problems further down in the price range, so maybe there is a chicken/egg situation.

i think people that are in a position to buy are unusually nervous of committing though... when the market is flying you buy a house knowing it might not be perfect because if you don't buy it, it'll be gone in a few days. but the market is so stagnant, i think people are sort of getting over picky...

we've had a woman who viewed 4 times and asked me how much i wanted for all the furniture etc, then told me she had decided she couldn't live in a house with a west facing garden.

another who viewed 3 times but told me to my face (so not just estate agents making stuff up) that although she absolutely loves the house, she thinks the flats opposite are not very attractive and she wouldn't want to be near them.

another viewed twice and brought builders round only to tell me he 'didn't like the look of the neighbours' (our neighbours are fabulous)

oh and another who said we are too far from the tube. we are 1/3 of a mile away, could hardly be any closer.

and my favourites, the ones who said it was 'too done up' for them, and proceeded to pay the same price for a smaller house just up the road which was a wreck so they could do it up. (if i'd known, i'd have offered to smash my place up for them before they moved in)