Would welcome some advice on negotiation.
We've got a sale agreed STC and have just had the results of the structural survey and IEE test back. It's worse than we hoped but better than we feared. Big thing is full rewire needed to tune of £5k not including making good. We reckon total of the 'ASAP' works need doing is around £10k.
What would you offer and any advice on going about it?
Vendor is desperate to move and has a chain free purchase agreed STC. House was originally on the market for £360, then dropped asking price to £310 within three weeks of it coming on the market and accepted £300 from us largely because we're chain free with mortgage offer already signed from prev deal which fell through at last minute.
On the one hand I feel we have leverage as they are clearly very itchy about moving quickly. On the other hand, they've already accepted much less than they were hoping for - £10k less than most recent asking price and £60k less than original asking price (although that was WILDLY overvalued) and it may well be they won't be able to afford wherever they're moving to if they don't get the price we agreed. We don't know much about their financial position. They've been there 35 years so is plausible they've paid off mortgage and are downsizing to release equity for retirement. But they seem in an indecent hurry to move so wonder if they perhaps have money problems.
We've got about £10k cash we can lay our hands on to do stuff, and looks like the identified problems will eat that all up and perhaps a bit more. But we were hoping to use that to do some quick win decorating and buy furniture (trading up from 1 bed to 3-4 bed owned so we need a lot of furniture!). State of decor is bad - but our original offer obviously accounted for that. We're basically happy to do cosmetic stuff as and when we can afford it. It's very shabby, but loads of potential to add value in an area that we think likely to go up over long term and it could be a 'forever' house. So we don't mind if it takes us a few years.
Basically if they refuse to budge on price I think we would probably go ahead anyway but getting something off the price would really help us out a lot. WWYD?