Early viewings

[Notmulan]

Some agents in the area (Surrey commuter town) offer early viewings of properties a day before the masses. What are your thoughts on this? Does it ever pay off for the buyer ? In an area of high demand, does it benefit the buyer at all or only make you a pawn in a bidding war. Have I become too cynical?

Second question. Does anyone remember a thread in the last month or so when a lady shared a really nicely worded note to leaflet drop on a preferred street

I viewed a lot “off market”. The advantages are you see them before anyone else in a highly competitive sellers market. You would need to be prepared to put in an asking price offer and be proceed-able to prevent it then going to the open market. The seller gets a good price and a motivated buyer. Having said that the one we are buying we got for £50k under as that was top of our budget and EA knew that. We were the only ones who viewed. The house is empty and the seller wanted a quick no mess sale which the EA knew we’d be up for. They would have received full asking on the market but less chance of having a chain free motivated buyer.

I did that - an agent approached me via a friend who had a similar house. His clients were desperate. I was about to market the house with an agent i knew well, so I told the speculative agent that it was a one shot deal - these buyers or nothing. He was fine we agreed an asking price. The buyers didn't end up offering, but from my point of view it would have saved time and hassle, even if I may have potentially got more on the open market. But I knew what number I would be comfortable accepting, they were ready to proceed so it was worth a try.

Does it pay off for the buyer OP? Of course it does! If you’re really desperate to buy something that’s in”high demand”. And I’m guessing from the second question which is about dropping letters through peoples doors, you are in the situation where you want a house that many other people are after and that is in limited supply. (We are too, so you have my sympathy).

The fact is if you’re buying and a really fantastic, rare house comes along, why wouldn’t you jump at the chance to get first dibs? And yes as previous posters say you need to be completely proceedable and prepared to offer the asking price (or near to it, or even over). It depends on how good the house is, and how many of them there are coming on the market, and how long you are prepared to wait for another one to come along and the market to die down.

We sold off market at the end of last year - a very nice country house in immaculate condition. Our buyers (they were the only ones to view) offered us what was going to be our asking price (if we’d got as far as putting it on the market), which we declined. They then came back to us with another 10% on top. We accepted and sold to them. They had been looking for a year and houses like that don’t come along very often. They were happy, we were happy.

If we’d have been in their position we’d have done the same thing too!

@Daisydoesnt thank you. On the first part: We’ve sold our house so ready to go. There’s not much coming on the market and demand is high. This house isn’t unique, but it’s pleasant and it’s close to good schools. We live in a town that’s accessible by train line to London Victoria quite easily but we work for local companies so not on a London wage. Our difficulty is we can’t compete. If we’re the first to put down our cards and offer at asking , it won’t cancel the future viewings they are already booking for next week. I think we’d have to go quite a bit over for the sellers to consider doing that. And it might not sell immediately.. it didn’t have a garage , had a conservatory that needed taking down, small box room, a long garden but backs on to the train line etc ..but it’s schools and station that drive demand here and it was good for both of those

When we first purchased a house 8 years ago , you would ring the estate agent with an offer (usually lower) , negotiate a bit and wait for a call within the same day to say that your offer was accepted and then the house would be listed as sold.

Now it seems that you make an offer, and then instead of hearing an answer the EAs allow the buyers to sit on it for quite some time, whilst they encourage other viewings. They say they won’t remove the house until they’ve completed checks on you, your chain etc and then string that out . I don’t know how to play this game and my husband and I disagree. He says go early. I think don’t show our hand but ask to be kept informed, in the hope we avoid the rush . Basically I think we need to wait for a house to become a bit stale .. which here is a fortnight! But that’s hard to do

On the second point.. we really liked a house that came on last year and took ages to sell. It was a bit further away from the station and ugly on the outside , but it had promise. So actually rather than chasing high demand properties we were considering chasing low demand ones as we thought we would be less likely to be outbid by fat wallets from the hedge funders in St. James’s