How much to offer?

[OhWesternWind]

This is my first time buying a house by myself, and also with the housing market being what it is at the moment I don't really feel confident of how much to offer. Is there a % of asking price guide?

I am looking at two houses, both on at £215-219k, both been on the market for a while. (One has foxgloves flowering on the photos, so May time, the other has grape hyacinth and daffs, so March/April).

The foxglove one is an "old lady" house so will need quite a bit of doing up, but is in a better area than the other one. 1960s bungalow like the one my mum lives in so I know this type of property very well.

The daffodil one is around 10/15 years old on a new-ish housing estate, so probably coming up for new kitchens, rewiring etc before too long. This one is also up to rent out so I don't know how/if that will affect the sale if there are tenants involved.

Any help much appreciated as I feel a bit out of my depth here.

Thanks

We have just bought 2 flats and a small semi. All on for roughly the same price that you are looking at. We got £5,000 off two and £10,000 off the other.
We put the offers in as first and final offer with four week completions and got accepted on all three within 24hrs of our offer.
We know it only takes 3/4 days for the mortage acceptance so were in a good position which probably helped the vendor in accepting.
I would say try it as a first time buyer you have no chain. Tell the EA you are not interested in offering more ie first and final offer and if it is rejected you will walk away. They take it from you then that you are serious.
We also insisted the properties were immediatly taken off the market.
Good luck

Have you looked at values / sold prices on Zoopla or mouseprice.com - doing research this way is probably better to give you some sort of idea about what similar things are selling for. Some people say try at 10% lower, and I think that houses are going for about 92% on average of asking price from statistics I saw a month or two ago. Good luck!

Got the "old lady house" with £30k knocked off! Result!!!

Well done! That is a great result