Offers going to best and final…your experiences?

[Notmyyearthisyear]

I’ve placed an initial offer with EA and now they are telling me that it is going best and final in two days but haven’t told me how many offers were received or how much the highest was (well, how much any of them was in fact).
Is this the usual process nowadays? A complete mystery? As far as I know I could be outbidding myself 😂 not likely I know in the current market.
Also would you be happy to share your experiences of the asking prices and what you offered at best and final, and if it got accepted?

We did a best and final in august last year but pretty sure we were the only ones seriously in the running, the EA was just trying to hype things up a bit. They’d already told me that ‘preference’ would be given to buyers who agreed to use there in house mortgage broker which is obviously underhand crap and I told them so.

We offered £325,00, best and final £327,500 which is what they agreed on, on market for £335,000. Only a flat sadly but it’s London zone 5 so there you go. Offered less than asking because we were FTB no chain and could move quick- although it still took nearly four months.

Yep, you could very well outbid yourself. We offered £20k over asking price. The house had about 30 viewings and 20 offers. I know we overpaid, but we really wanted the house and it’s a crazy market. I’m in the South East. We always knew if would go over asking price and then put in an extra £5k as for us, that wasn’t worth losing it. Would rather have not done it though!

I had the same, mine was the highest bid but they went with the people in rented as I was in a chain of 3 which I then asked why we had gone to best and final. I exchanged a week later.

You win some, you lose some. It is a blind game but you can get some hints about others circumstances.

House we were successful on last year; offers over 350, bid 390. 60% LTV, short chain (cash buyer on ours), subject to NO survey. We wrote a covering letter explaining what the house would mean to us. Had been searching for a year and seen houses with the same agent so they knew we were serious.

We won, 4 bidders at least 20k over us but all 90% mortgages subject to survey.

So I do think circumstances are as important as price.

We have gone to best and final offers many, many times. In most cases, the EA would let us know how many offers they had (so far anyway) and perhaps some indication what they expected them to be. Generally, they won't tell you what the other offers are (just as they won't tell anyone else your offer).

We did have one tell us at viewing what the highest offer was, another who would just say it's over guide price, and others that would given no indication at all. I think this is just how it is right now. You have to go in with what you would be happy to pay if you want the property.

When we had our offer accepted, we made an initial offer day of viewing for about 7% over guide. It went to best and final a few days later and we raised it to 10% over. I have no idea what the other offers were, but I do suspect that ours was probably considerably higher. Dh and I just decided that we were happy with that. Ultimately, it added about £40 a month to our mortgage to increase our offer. It was worth the extra £40 to us, and I wouldn't be bothered to know that we could have gotten it for less as we're just happy we got it.

Most property in Scotland is sold in this way with an "offers over" price and then sealed bids on a closing date. The offers over price is typically below the valuation report price and offers often go well over the valuation price in certain areas, but you can only get a mortgage up to the valuation so it favours those with larger cash reserves. It's good in a way that you don't have people bidding and out-bidding in each other but can be frustrating if you just want to buy a property at a reasonable price and keep getting outbid by those willing to throw silly money at it. Also get your ducks in a row in terms of mortgage offer, chain etc as these can make the difference in how attractive you are to a vendor if bids are the same / similar.

Our last house went to "best and final offers". We entered a figure which was at the top of our budget (but still slightly below asking price - this was a few years ago when the market was less frantic!). We heard a couple of days later that our offer had been accepted.

When we sold through the same agents a few years later they mentioned that we hadn't actually been the highest bidder but the vendor preferred us because we were chain free and had a good deposit, so it's worth emphasising all your good points and not just the amount you're offering.

Good luck!

We had 5 bids on ours - 2 at asking price and 3 over - we went for the second highest as they were chain free.

Depends how it has been priced. We've just bought one that was on the market for 10-15k less than similar houses had gone for recently (I think to sell quickly). We offered 20k (and a bit to make an odd number!) over because there were 6 other bidders, we desperately wanted the location (which doesn't come up often) and the plot.

Conversely we put ours on at the top of what we could expect, had 3 bidders for best & final and chose one that was 5k over asking (not the highest but the most proceedable).

We asked ourselves "would we wish we had paid more if we lost it" and picked that number - any higher would have been unaffordable / sick feeling territory. Good luck!