How do you negotiate with estate agents if you have two different budgets?

[Bakedbanana]

So we are planning to move house to a new town. Most of the houses in the area we like (area A) seem to go for £450-500k. Our current house is worth about the same. All fine.
However there is also another part of town, just two streets basically, where the houses are lovely (area B)! Big, semi detached period properties. Our dream. They are around £600k. We could do this (I think!) with a combination of a larger mortgage and help from family. But they come up less often.

I want to show I am serious about area B and feel in the current market we need to be chatting to estate agents about our desire for these houses before one even comes up for sale.
But if I say we can afford £600k then surely the agents will try every trick in the book to try and push up any offer we make for a house in area A. I don't want to overpay and stretch ourselves for an average house.
I don't want to show my cards but don't want to be discounted from anything coming up in area B.

What should we do?

We had this problem. The difference between what we’d prefer to pay and what we could pay was around £500k (ie we didn’t need a big house but if a big house came up which we loved we could buy it). I just explained to the agents that the budget was x but if something amazing came up up we could go to the higher end of our budget. The agents were respectful of this (which surprised me to be honest!) and we ended up buying a house on the lower end of our budget so we could do a full reno before moving in.

Thanks, That's good to know they respected your point of view. And good you were able to keep your extra funds for the renovations.