Making an offer at an 'open house'

[TrixieLox]

Hi everyone!

We're viewing a great house next weekend in an ideal location. The estate agent is holding an open day (four hours of 15 min appointments). It's a sought after road so I imagine it'll be popular (this makes it sound like it's a massive expensive house, it's not, just a beautiful road in a great school catchment area with some lovely houses with character features).

We have an offer on our house from a first-time buyer and a mortgage in principle agreed with a decent deposit so hopefully we're in a strongish position.

But houses in the town we're looking at, and the road, go the day they go on sale sometimes at the moment.

What advice would you all offer? What if we absolutely love the house, should we offer right after our appointment (we know the road and area well, and know people who live in the street who say the house is lovely, so it wouldn't feel too impulsive).

There's also a catch: we have to go to a wedding in the middle of a forest (so possibly no phone reception) at 2. Our viewing is at 10.30, the open house ends at 2. Eeek! So we're not really going to be available in the afternoon.

Any advice appreciated.

Write your offer letter and hand deliver to estate agent before the wedding!

Give all details about why you are perfect purchaser…..

Yes, offer straight away and explain your position. No reason not to. Every reason to do so.

Good luck!

I wouldn't worry about not being around at 2. Express an interest on the day (if you are still interested, of course) and then send a letter, preferably from a solicitor, making your offer and setting out your position (if s/he can say that you are already some way down the conveyancing route on your own house, all the better) on Monday.

Good luck. Remember that open houses are done, in part, to ratchet up the pressure on buyers. Try not to get too jumpy.

I think these are quite stressful. What if the 10 o clock people offer, do they cancel other viewings?

No Pelvicfloor, they take the offers people make on the day and decide whether they want to follow up any of them. We had two open house viewings recently on the same day, in the same road. The first one accepted an offer that day at asking price from a cash buyer who was ready to progress; the others were in less of a hurry so the estate agent spent the week phoning back interested parties to see what they were prepared to offer. We pulled out when it went over £100k past the asking price.

No, they wouldn't. Any sensible buyer would just tell the agent to pretend they are unavailable on the day and will consider any buyers later that week. If the agent has potentially 15 more viewings lined up, s/he isn't going to cancel them unless it's an amazing offer (hugely over asking price with exchange that week or something similarly unlikely).

We did an open house on the Saturday and interested parties had to submit best and final offer by the Tuesday do all viewers had a fair chance (it was a very long bank holiday weekend)!!

has the seller found any house to buy yet? and what is the forward chain situations etc? if it is not chain free then I really don't see any rush in offering even it is open day viewing.

Thanks, everyone. It's so hard to know what to offer too, isn't it? Yes, of course, offer what we feel it's worth. But what if we feel it's worth over the asking price and yet, if we offer over the asking price, there's the chance it could have gone for less... anyway, I guess we just see on the day.

And I bloomin' hope they don't close the open day if someone puts in an offer at 10am!

When we did an open house for our flat (on a Sat), we got four offers (either on the day or on the Monday) and agent went to 'best-and-final' offers due in by the Weds.

There's no way we would have accepted an offer from the first viewer of the day - the point of these things is to gauge interest and to ratchet it up. So even if we'd had an offer over asking price at 10am, we still would have waiting to let everyone who wanted to view the flat and to see what sort of offers they were going to make, if at all.

V interested to read this, OP, as I have been to an open house today and put an offer in just have to wait until next week to find out how we did!

The whole tango of asking price v how much work it'll require/not overpaying is a bit agonising.

Good luck!

The agent will probably contact all interested parties on the Monday, and ask for best offers.

A dilapidated, small semi in a lovely street near me was valued at £200k just after Christmas and an open morning arranged. It sold for £209k the next week - 3 "proceedable" parties had offered £200k on the day and 2 of them put in higher bids on the Monday at the agent's request.