Sellers roll call! How many viewings are you gettingin this stagnant market?

[Pixiedust1973]

I thought it would be nice to update each other with our progress as I seem to of lost the other sellers thread!

My house has been on the market on & off since April last year. We found a house we liked, got a buyer before putting in an offer. Had a low offer but managed to negotiate them up & the house we want down to an acceptable level, just! Turns out after many months that their buyer can't proceed so we decide to cut off from our old agents & start afresh with a 25k reduction for quick sale, making us without question the best house in the area for the price! Comparables being 40-50k higher! Im in an expensive part of Surrey btw, hence silly money for very little!

Been on 55 days now & had 11 viewings, 2 cheeky try their luck offers we can't accept because they're 30k below our asking price already reduced by 25k. Id say that given how stagnant the market is we're getting a reasonable amount of interest. Getting lots more hits online since the new year & hopefully its only a matter of time. The viewers we are getting are proceedable viewers, mainly chain free. Probably explains the low offers! Had a second viewing on Friday & awaiting their feedback today. Thought they were keen but the later in the day it gets the more nervous im getting!

It isn’t always the buyers who neglect to give feedback. There are a number of EAs who don’t bother to follow up or even want to listen to viewer feedback once they hear a no...

Also weekend viewings IME seem to be done by junior or temp staff (who know nothing/little about the property). So strange.

We’re chain free buyers and keen to find our forever home. I’m still waiting for one EA to call me back from 2 weeks ago about a query I raised on a house we liked. They never called for my feedback in the first place...I called them 5 days after the viewing. Little wonder that the poor vendor has been on the market since last August!!

Definitely worth asking friends to contact your EA and arrange a viewing and be a “secret shopper” if you’re struggling to shift a property!

We are almost at the point of coming off the market. We have reduced the price to reflect the fact that buyers want a new kitchen and bathroom. There are no other properties with a direct access private garden at our price point but buyers don’t seem to want that

We are lucky in that ours was rented out priviously so we are going to put it back on the rental market and wait a couple of years until the marketing picks back up

Market even

Poppinder I can see the logic in coming off! We are quite tempted to do that too!!!

Onceuponatimethen it just feels like buyers are wanting an awful lot for their money, but guess that’s what happens in a buyers market. It’s just so frustrating that they are being so picky

It's so hard to know what to do for the best. Its a mad mad process! Everyone wants to feel like they're getting a bargain nowadays in these slow/stagnant areas & will completely disregard the fact that you may have already reduced to take into account kitchen & bathroom etc. They'll still look to reduce again & cite the necessary work as reasons!

We reduced our price by a significant amount when we had a house we were buying at a low level. When our buyers lost their buyers we remarketed it low in an attempt to attract an offer quickly, despite the fact we had previously had interest at the old price, which was lower than many competitors. All it served to do was encourage people to bid super low thinking we were desperate. We were, but couldn't accept that amount off & still move on, even with the good deal we'd agreed ongoing. We eventually started afresh with a new agent at the old asking price. Still getting viewings & now not bothered if people want to reduce us by 25-30k & feel they're getting a bargain.

@BuildingThings there are lots of different houses in our area, so can be quite hard to work out an average.

We put it on for 2.5% less than this agent advised, 5% more than the other 2 had stated, and have accepted an offer of asking price.

FML! Just had another kick in the teeth! Just as we were coming off from Purplebricks, about 3 weeks ago, we had one last viewing & they were very interested. Came round 3 times, literally put their house on with our new EA in order to buy ours. Then they got a buyer & changed their minds & decided to buy something 125k more than ours. Even the EA is shocked. Said he was convinced they'd go for ours! So now we're going to drop the price by 10k in order to hopefully generate some new interest for the weekend! Fingers crossed!

Well I'm not holding out much hope after tonight's viewings. As soon as anyone with 2 children walks in we know they're not going to buy it as it won't be big enough. We're 3 bed but it's 2 doubles and a 6x6 box. The box is the thing 😕 Gahhrr I curse the architects who designed these family homes with 2 huge and 1 tiny room what were they thinking?

I am really surprised to see this thread because where I live (Woodford, London), houses are sold within 5 to 6 days of coming into market and mostly for more than (in some cases much more than) the asking prices. Market slowdown doesn't apply to buyers here. I really feel sorry for people having to reduce their asking prices. My advice to people is to not believe in market slowdown, job losses and such and just go about like normal. There are far too many people looking to buy houses than people wanting to sell and no part of London will ever face any slowdown in the near future. And it's summer soon and the market is going to bounce back and hit a new high. Soon enough media will start feeling sorry for all those hopeless FTBs trying to put their foot in the ladder. But lucky people who are already on the ladder have nothing to fear or lose. Cheer up folks!

@MovingThisYearHopefully That's really bad! So sorry that happened. Maybe they'll come back to yours if the other one falls through? I'm curious, when you got those low offers, did you counter them?

@ArcticMumkey That must be so disappointing are you looking to upsize? Maybe you could extend and somehow re-design the layout for the box room to be a decent size or is this not possible? Does your listing have a measured floor plan?

@reasonableme there's evidence of the opposite in the construction industry - a few colleagues are seeing about 25% less work this year compared to last.

@reasonableme - there may be small pockets of London which are unaffected but in my bit, houses are not shifting - there’s a couple on my road which have been on the market for months now and the asking price is less than slightly smaller houses at the other end of the road were selling for pre-brexit. We’re hoping to move next year but if things don’t pick up quickly it might not make financial sense

@reasonableme I really think your advice is borderline dangerous to be honest! I don't know Woodford at all so can't comment on it but prices generally in London are going down. If sellers hold out & market continues to drop they'll miss selling oppurtunities.

Also you have no way of telling if stuff is going for over asking as there is a lag in sales data. Properties we saw go SSTC in Dec/Jan still not coming up on land registry. Reductions common, just pick a London borough on Zoopla & filter by most reduced.

Summer usually very slow for sales with holidays etc. Spring is when people advise to sell "the spring bounce" that's categorically not happend this year.

I don't mean to come across as doom & gloom & not saying we're in massive crash territory but we are in slowdown/correction territory & blind optimism won't help.

Building yes we are upsizing as we need an additional bedroom and a different downstairs layout. We've explored extending ours but it's not workable unfortunately and would also be vastly more expensive than moving.

Also yes the floor plan has dimensions

@Kamma89, at the same time sellers should not lose out on a great deal by hastily reducing their asking prices. What I meant to say is that the current market maybe preventing FTBs get on to the ladder but if you already own a house, it's not all gloom and doom.

I look at land registry data frequently and there is evidence of transaction volumes going down but no clear evidence of house prices going down necessarily. I will surely believe it when I see it

I could of posted similar myself ArcticMumkey. Ours is also 2 beds & a box. We currently have the equivalent of 4 adults living here. My 17-year-old is in the box & her wardrobe is in our room. It's a nightmare! I just know that most people, unless they're DIY freaks won't be interested in ours. The couple who were so keen on ours that to quote our EA, they "literally spoke of nothing else" suddenly found an extra 125k to buy an ugly house on a narrow road, simply because it had already been extended. Would of cost less than 125k to make our house to their own taste, plus ours has a bigger garden, frontage, a garage, is 2 minutes walk to the local play park &10 minutes walk closer to the local comp & is undoubtedly in a much nicer location all round, yet they chose to spend extra rather than have the agro of extending it themselves!

Buildingthings, yes we did counter the offers when they were made. Unfortunately it seemed that these people were complete chancers trying their luck with incredibly low offers with a vendor that they saw as desperate. This happened when the market was at its slowest, just before Christmas. One of the offers we had was from someone who hadn't even seen the house. The level of offers was at the same as we were offered by those companies that buy your house in 7 days.

Completely agree with your post Kamma89 in response to reasonableme's post. Not great advice to tell people to basically sit on their thumbs & wait. If only it were that easy lol.

Agree - we sold in London and it was tough - ended up taking an offer 10% less than price :(

We are also finding as a buyer there is just not much on the market. The well priced ones go instantly

For those of you getting low offers (ignoring the ridiculously low) is it not possible to get your onward purchase reduced? Obvs not helpful if not buying on but I think that's how we got ours. Our seller got a reduction from his who was end of chain.

I am still pondering what to do with our low offer and I know what you mean Kamma - just can’t see anyone reducing as far down as our offer is now off our asking and would hate to make an offer like it!!

Most of the houses in our area have already been reduced 25k and I can’t inagine them being happy if I asked them to take a further 60k off, taking them to 85k below asking - and that would be where I’d hope to send up so would I then make an offer 80k below their current asking and then go up after first offer stage?!

We were told this morning our buyers have gone to sale agreed STC on theirs so it’s now a real potential offer and we still don’t now what to do. Haven’t replied yet and they have said no point is countering at all as they will not go above the price they’ve quoted.

@ArcticMumkey that's a bit annoying - they could've just looked at the plan to see it's too small for them. If it's not financially viable to extend your self, have you thought about just getting planning permission for the extension/extra bedroom. You could then raise the value of the property and sell it with the planning consent?

@Kamma I agree, I wonder if the sellers had accepted a lower offer months ago - they could probably have bought something by now as the market has slumped. A colleague of mine did this and went into a very nice rented house, and can now afford to buy stuff that was just above his budget last year.

Building Definitely something to think about. We have another viewer coming tomorrow, single guy who has sold his property and is in rented i.e exactly the kind of buyer we want! Crossing everything.

@ArcticMumkey Sounds very promising, good luck!

Fingers crossed for you arctic - really hope this works out!