Making offers on houses

[estateagents]

Hi

How much do you need to tell estate agents and what evidence should I have to make one?

Situation is that I'll need a mortgage - I'm planning to offer less than I can afford on "paper"

I have a deposit which I could prove through bank statements but I'm worried that When I phone up to make an offer they'll encourage the vendors to reject it when they go through my incomings and outgoings and realise I could be offering more

As such I can get a DIP etc for any amount I'm planning to offer

Most estate agents ask for a DIP/AIP before putting the offer forward to the vendors.

When we offered on a property, our DIP was for a lot more than our offer, so instead of showing them our DIP we got our mortgage adviser to write a letter stating that our offer price could be achieved.

As above. Don’t use estate agents in house services, commission your own whole of market mortgage broker (almost always works out cheaper than paying commission) and it keeps all your financial information separate from the estate agent.

All that said if you are somewhere houses still fly off the market and they have buyers queuing up it may well mean estate agents will push buyers with more profit in them rather than you. At the end of the day you are the product the estate agent is selling to the chap with the house to sell, and if the next guy is going to pay the in house solicitor plus mortgage chaps plus survey etc the estate agent will try and get the buyer to choose them.

I was told by 3 Estate Agents last week that at the point of offer they need to have proof that a potential buyer has the resources to proceed in the form of a mortgage offer or cash. Offers will not be passed to us if the potential buyer isn't "proceedable".
That is also the point at which Money laundering checks will be made on them (not sure exactly what that comprises though but will find out soon as we'll be checked when we enter a contract with an EA).

We had an offer accepted recently and only showed our DIP once the price was accepted. I was advised not to share it until that point otherwise you're letting the agent know how high you can go. We were asked for it but said we'd se d it once a price was accepted.

Surely you could be able tomorrow, say, £400k but only want to buy a house for £275k so what would you do then? I can't see it matters if you can borrow more as an EA can't make you offer more than ypu are prepared to pay.

I assume an EA can't tell a seller your financial info other than that you are in a position to proceed otherwise they would contravene the GDPR 2018.

No, they can't make you offer higher but it puts you at a disadvantage in negotiating terms. They know how far they have scope to push you as they know your top end.

That was the advice I had anyway. We offered a fair bit lower than we could afford according to our DIP as we don't want to stretch ourselves and we thought it was a fair price for the house. I suppose we may not have gone higher even we'd had to show our hand earlier so perhaps it doesn't matter. I don't know though, I'm not a professional negotiator whereas EAs are.