DH and I have found a property we really like which is on for 250k. It has been on the market for about 3 months. We have nothing to sell but are waiting for a will to be settled.
We have zero house buying experience and were advised by parents to put in an offer of 10% under asking. But the EA said that the vendors would likely not even consider anything under about 245k so presenting that offer would be really cheeky and might make them not want to sell to us etc. Cue us retracting the offer and DH getting a bit annoyed that house hadn't been marketed as "offers over".
We love the house but don't want to pay over the odds.There isn't much for sale in the area so sold prices aren't much use as not much has been sold in the last couple of years and some properties sit on the market for ages. I do know that the vendors paid about 50k less than current asking price for the house about 6 years ago after it had been on the market for well over a year (Northumberland).
During conversations the EA has done the usual thing of "there is another buyer who is really interested and is just waiting to sell their property before they put in an offer". We are pretty sure this isn't true (following conversations with the vendors who conducted our viewing themselves). EA has also been hounding us a little bit. After the first offer which we retracted the EA left two voicemails and sent an email to DH within a 24 hour period wanting to know if we were going to make another offer which makes us think either there is no one else on the horizon or the EA is just really aggressive in his sales style (or both!)...
We have since put in an offer of 240k which was rejected a couple of days ago. We don't want to seem desperate and immediately up the offer. Instead we have asked for another viewing before thinking it over more. Does this seem like a good strategy?
On the one hand we can imagine ourselves living in the house and being really happy there. On the other hand we are pretty annoyed with the EA and don't want to get manipulated into paying possibly an extra 10k if not absolutely necessary (we have grand plans to be mortgage free as quickly as possible so that 10k would make quite a big difference to us)
Any advice gratefully received!