If you’ve had an offer accepted recently - are you tempted to gazunder?

[Amtheyest17]

Hello,

If you’ve had an offer accepted recently - have you or are you tempted to gazunder because of market conditions?

With the volatility in the market and house prices coming down. Obviously there is a concern that you could be overpaying for something

Anyone planning to or tempted? I know it’s a shitty thing to do. Not saying we will but we keep coming up against hurdles because of the market and we are starting to consider changing our offer as market conditions are really squeezing us now.

That's part of the point isn't it ?

The sellers nearly always know the stuff that is wrong with a place, they are in the best position to. But keep quite in the hope people won't notice.

They don't worry about the fact that you might lose 2K or so having to pull out of a sale due to a bad survey, so why should you worry about re-negotiating the price ?

Horses for courses.

Sellers just don't like it when they aren't on top anymore.

It seems extraordinarily immoral to steal £100,000s from my family to give to a complete stranger for something I can get cheaper easily elsewhere and much more embarrassing to stick to a redundant offer than reducing it. The question is always would you mind if you didn't get that home for that price. If there's any doubt then revise your offer and walk away from faux moral emotional touts whose only interest is in your money. Even in a seller's market it's about extracting money, and the only source is the buyer. That's why it's cleaner to sell at auction and better to market at a lower price because that will attract more competition and a better chance of the best sale. Sellers can always withdraw if they think they can do better at another time.

I agree. There should be regulations in place to protect buyers from sellers like this by way of surveys being part of a transparency agreement when signing up with an estate agent. No survey, no sale.

I read a horror story online that was similar to my own, and the estate agent had sight of multiple surveys from a property, all saying the same thing and none of them could be shared! It's madness!

That’s bollocks. The buyer of my first house attempted this in the mid 90s, just as the market was beginning to recover. I was selling for exactly the same amount that I paid, in line with comparable properties. Some people will always try it on. He attempted to get a price reduction the day before exchange. He was told to fuck off and we exchanged at the agreed price. He was a chancer.

I bought last year and no, I would not. Just as the vast majority of sellers do not raise the price between offer accepted and exchange when the market is rising.

There is a kind of form you have to fill out. It's not compulsory, I think it is done by the law society. It could be a lot more comprehensive and sellers can get action against them if they deliberately lie on the form.

It doesn't cover structural issues I think though.

A common tactic I've seen is that a buyer ends up getting a bad survey, rather than the seller telling the next potential buyer the survey has revealed issues, they just keep going at the same price hoping the next persons survey will not uncover the problem or that the next buyer may be a cash buyer and not have a survey and will miss the problem.

It's just a waste of everyones time and money and is a perfect example of how sellers game the system as much as buyers do.

If you challenged a seller on it you'd probably get "caveat emptor" !

Somehow ethics are only supposed to go one way...

These things need to be made clear in the advert for the house, it shouldn’t be hidden. As that is equally immoral.

The market is in a bad way, I believe it will soon have a significant price adjustment, please do your research before committing. If you're a first time buyer, or know that you won't be staying in the property for more than 5 yrs + there's a big risk atm of negative equity.

I agree, in order to put a property on the market you should have to have a survey/report done by a registered company and anyone who is interested in buying the property should have access to this information.
It shouldn't be up to each buyer to have their own survey, or not.

It's just a waste of everyones time and money and is a perfect example of how sellers game the system as much as buyers do
True but it makes a nice profit for the companies who do surveys and they will be the ones pushing for it to continue.
You can characterise it as gaming the system but with such a large amount of money at stake people are bound to explore every loophole they can in order to get an advantage for themselves, we need a better system one, which promotes and incentivizes transparency.
Large amounts of profit are blood in the water for sharks like estate agents and all the middle men who gather when they can smell money.

I think a better system would be for the seller to have the searches and survey done before they go to market. This should cut down on conveyancing time. It also weeds out the uncommitted sellers and would hopefully mean that more properties are realistically priced when they go to market and buyers are less likely to pull out as they placed their offer armed with more information.
I can’t see this being something that surveyors or conveyancers would welcome as it would mean less business - no more than one survey per property.
I believe the system in Scotland is more like this?

Yes I agree.

I'm pretty sure that the demise of the Homeowners pack was something to do with outside pressure/lobbying by certain groups.

You can see how there would be a lot of VIs in the industry against that.

I wouldn’t trust a survey paid for by the seller so it would be pointless. We did have sellers’ packs for a couple of years and they were quietly dropped because buyers, quite understandably, had no faith in them and duplicated anyway.

I take your point but at the same time I still think that every property which is put up for sale should be required to have a comprehensive home buyers report to which any prospective buyer has full access.
There must be some way of doing it such that these reports can be trusted?

And as @GasPanic says it seems likely that the demise of the homebuyer's report was at least in part due to pressure from those whose profits were negatively impacted by it?

The demise of the homebuyers’ report was because nobody trusted it. Who in their right mind would when they’re spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on the biggest purchase of their life?

They manage to make this work in plenty of other countries.
I imagine it was shelved due to pressure groups rather than because it is impossible to arrange for reputable companies to carry out the work.
There are clearly some buyers who are just chancers but, equally, the market is clearly falling and under stress and most people are concerned about their finances and ability to borrow. House prices are way above affordable levels so gazundering will be far more common in those circumstances.
Sellers are no better and cannot claim the moral high ground. Lots seem to just list to see if they can sell for an over inflated value given current market and essentially waste everyone's time and money.

It should be illegal.

https://www.theweek.co.uk/business/956689/is-the-uk-heading-for-a-housing-crash

If you are not happy with the sellers survey, you can commission an additional one of your own.

The sellers survey at least provides some information, which can be used by the buyer to screen out potential problems. It's not 100% foolproof, but at least would stop a lot of sales processes proceeding at an early stage that would otherwise be stopped much later in the process by surveys and thus costing buyers (potential multiple ones) money and time.

It seems to work OK in Scotland.

I came here to say this.

A Gazunder is a potty that 'goes under' the bed!!

No. But house prices in this area are still going up by 5% a year!

It works in Scotland apparently so don't see why it couldn't be made to work here too

Opinions vary - in that article, on Mumsnet and everywhere it seems.

Does anyone know why Scotland have been able to make this work but we haven't?
Is it because their system overall is better than ours?

No reason why it can't be made to work.

But it needs to be designed well from the start, including the liability "pathway" and also the route to recourse if for example the homebuyers pack fails to provide the necessary information.

Basically in these sorts of things the existence of a good and reasonable recourse pathway determines how trusted the system is and whether it can be relied on as a process which can be used to underpin transactions.

For example it probably goes hand in hand with homebuyers packs evaluations being held to high standards, and subsequent consequences for companies that don't meet those standards.

Unfortunately houses are complex things and it is not always easy to evaluate them accurately - particularly older buildings.