How hard to push back on EA/Seller after them messing around

[AX35]

Hi,

This weekend, we had several viewings in an area we quite like, and we found a house that would be a bit of a project but okay enough to buy it to get the whole process started (As we have already been looking the entire year).

The house was bought in 2021 for 675k, and it is clear that the owners need to sell ASAP as they seemingly can't pay their mortgage rates after their 2 yr fix expiring. They initially offered it for 800k to reduce it to 700k with increments in the last 8 weeks. The estate agent told us the reason they are selling is that they want to move closer to the school of their kid but also that they are looking to get a house in the 500-600k price range from them.

Side note: We made an offer for another house from the same estate agent a month ago at 800k.

The interest in the house was still quite limited even after all of those reductions there were only three viewings on the weekend.

Now, we put in an offer at 700k to incentivise them to move on and sell, only for the estate agent to come back to us and tell us there is another interested party who offered higher than us and is also not part of a chain. As a reaction, we reduced our offer to 675k as either there is another party interested, in which case we are happy to lose the house, or the estate agent/seller wants to mess with us, in which case we wanted to push back.

The estate agent now came back telling us that the seller would like to accept our offer (no reason given) and to proceed with all the formalities.

Now, the whole thing left me very annoyed at the greed of either EA or the seller, and we are thinking of dropping the price further to 650k or lower. We know that that might push them into negative equity and ultimately lose the house because of it but I just don't want them to get away with their sleazy tactic for that cheap.

What would do in that situation? How much would you reduce it / would you further reduce it at all?

I don't know how anyone can justify this sort of behaviour.

You know that was aimed at you, right?

You shouldn’t play stupid games with people. Clever to drop your offer when they tried to get you to raise but the rest of your posts don’t paint you in a good light at all

How do you know the higher offer wasn't withdrawn? I don't think you're 'in the right' on this one. Offers should be made in good faith, and stuck to unless a survey or or search is adverse in ways you could not have forseen. If you weren't serious about the house, you ought not to have offered in the first place. I for one don't like to do business with people who mess other people around.

This^ Very much this.

Not sure why you are taking this out on the sellers when it is the EA at fault (or so you believe)

you clearly aren’t even bothered about this particular property and seem to think you have the upper hand in todays market. Well good luck with that because you are going to need it with an approach to life like yours!

I always take what EAs say with a large pinch of salt but I don’t get worked up about it. It’s the same house, you were prepared to pay £700k and they’ve accepted £675 - how you got there and your assumptions about their financial situation shouldn’t really matter.
It’s quite possible that they did have another interested party who changed their mind, it happens a lot.
If you have changed your mind and either want to offer less or pull out then that’s your decision but make that decision based on what the house is worth to you not as some sort of punishment for what you perceive as bad behaviour.

How do you know it was a ghost buyer? A family member had a property for sale and after 4 weeks received 2 x identical offers on the same day. The EA said best and final offers to them and only one buyer came back with an increased offer the other buyer would not increase their offer and therefore dropped out.

Well said

Dear god, I hope I never have to deal with buyers like you! Are you a FTB? I’d be walking away if I was the seller - you sound like an absolute nightmare.

I bet you’ll want thousands off for every little niggle that comes up in the survey as well, won’t you?

We were on the market for 6 weeks then 2 offers an hour apart and one the next day. I did think that the people offering would think the agent was making it up.

Exactly - when we put an offer in on the house we are buying at the moment, the EA said they’d had an asking price offer “but the seller wanted to sell to us instead as I work for the NHS” (which I thought was a total pack of lies, however we were chain free which might have had some bearing on things).

We ended up increasing our offer by 1%, which was still 4% under asking, and apparently the seller was happy with that, and accepted the offer. No need to act like a dick or try to “get back” at anyone. We’re still happy with the price, the seller is now happy with the price, nobody feels ripped off, we can all complete happily.

If she’d held out for asking price we’d have walked, and if we’d held out for 5% under asking price, I don’t know if she’d have walked or not but I don’t think she’d have felt as positively towards the sale as she currently does.

@Saschka It’s good to hear that not everyone assumes that buyers and sellers are all trying to rip each other off. When I sold I agreed a reduction post survey with my buyers as there were some necessary roof repairs - I didn’t blame them for asking. When we bought the estate agent did try to create a sense of urgency by saying that there were other interested parties and we had to up our first offer a little but not to the figure he said they were looking for as that was over our budget.
I’m not convinced there were competing offers but who knows. We maintained good relations with the sellers and they kindly left some lovely things that we had admired whilst viewing but were not on the fixtures & fitting form - like window boxes, outdoor potted plants, beautiful light fittings, a basket of logs for the wood burner and also the place was spotlessly clean with a welcoming card and bottle of wine. That sort of thing really helps with the stress of moving.

As others have said, a higher offer may have fallen through

Yeah, don't be a dick. As a pp said, I imagine they'd rather sell to anyone but you at this point, so if you drop your offer still further it's unlikely they'd stop marketing it even if they accept. I'm sure it would give them great pleasure to wait until you've spent money on surveys and conveyancing to pull out and sell to someone who's since come along with a higher offer than your negative equity-inducing one.

Also, don't assume you know anything about their circumstances. When I sold a property at the end of last year, one of my lying, game-playing, arsehole buyers started a thread on here asking if people thought she should gazunder at the last minute on the basis that we were probably mortgage-free and didn't need the price we'd agreed to sell at (and lots of other incorrect assumptions). Everyone told her it would be a shameful way to behave and she never came back to the thread - but she went ahead and did it anyway. (I'm sure she'll know who she is, so in the unlikely event she's reading this: please know that your last-minute actions caused real hardship that is being felt right now.)

Just pay what you think it's worth, end of.

I mean who knows? Their mortgage in 2021 would have been at 1%-2%, today someone buying is 5%-6%. But you're still paying the peak price.

Maybe you are being double played? They've made you think you have outplayed them and driven a hard bargain, but you have just given them what they are after.

That's what the kite-flying prices are there for, either to see if there are any people with more money than sense out there, but also then for someone to feel they got a massive discount when they haven't.

Just to provide a hopefully final update on this saga.

We pulled out two weeks ago as it didn't feel and sit right with us and explained the same to the EA. They came back later saying that the sellers really would love to sell to us and they would be willing to drop to 655k. We told them that we are still not interested no matter how low they go and asked them to never contact us again. We sent the sellers a letter apologizing for the back and forth, explained the EAs approach and why we ultimately pulled out of the deal. Not sure if coincidence or a reaction but they took the house off the market yesterday.

We got quite lucky and found another place in better condition with huge garden and without needing much work so we offered asking price mentioning that we just want a smooth buying process. for that one but there were three other offers in the table. There were four other offers according to the EA (plausible as this has been on the market just for two weeks) but it didn't go for best and final and they just accepted our offer so we are excited about starting the buying process.

Talking to the EA we are dealing with now (He is pretty much a one man EA with plenty local contacts and repeat customers) he explained that a lot of other EAs are struggling to adjust to the buyers market as they don't have a playbook for that so they act like it's a seller's market. He ultimately needs to do what his client tell him but he advises everyone against a bidding war right now if they feel like they are priced right as that will just invite people to overbid initially but then when it comes post survey or pre exchange people are asking for reductions back to their original offer which leads to deals falling through.

Happy ending and loads of learnings for us hopefully.

I should think they're well shot of you. You sound like an obnoxious timewaster. "Never contact us again" - ?? Who do you think you are ffs?

I hope they've taken it off the market because they had another interested party all along, and that their transaction goes smoothly and they get to be near their DC's school just as they wanted.