Did a reduction in the price of your house lead to a sale?

[Rookie23]

There is so much debate on whether or not properties are overpriced between buyers and sellers on different threads so just wanted feedback from both buyers and sellers who have sold/bought in 2023 and this year alone to kinda see what the market is like in different areas.

My question is;

1. For sellers, did you sell from a reduction or at asking?
2. For buyers & sellers, if reduced, did the reduction in price warrant a sale/offer accepted or is your house still on the market?

It would also be good to know what city or town or if it was a prime location as well for clarity.

p.s this is not a thread to incite arguments. Just trying to see what it has been like for different people who have actually sold recently or in the sale process.
Thank you 🥰

I think the answers you get will be highly dependent on how big of a reduction the sellers were willing to make. There are a lot of people that have reduced by tiny percentages, or are fixated on the value of the reduction (£10k) even when it's small percentage off the purchase price. Most buyers these days are willing to make offers 10% under. If you're still not getting offers it's likely your house is overpriced by more than 10%. The people that still haven't sold because they are unwilling to make meaningful reductions are of course going to say it didn't help at all.

It's not the overall price that is putting buyers off but the affordability of the monthly payments now that interest rates have risen. Sellers, especially of FTB homes, need to be thinking about how much they need to reduce to get the monthly payments down to a reasonable level (based on local wages) for a buyer with an average size deposit.

I bought.

No reduction.

No house to sell.

I sold. Accepted an offer 10% over asking 2 days after going on Rightmove in September 2023.

That is because there was a whole generation who had their money value perception warped by low interest rates, cheap debt basically, they were prepared to ignore the big number that the house cost if the monthly payment to live in the house was a small number, basically a childlike approach to debt and money. Unfortunately the long term average cost of money is in the range of 5 - 7%? So anyone who fell for the bankers scam and hasnt paid their debt down is about to be roasted as the piper now has his big bagpipes out and wants payment.

Use PropertyLog to follow reductions in your area, unfortunately many sellers are still just starting at a very silly price and reducing to a silly price, and then wondering why no one wants their house, LOL.

Greater London. Large family house in fantastic location. Got four valuations. All coalesced around the same number but one said additionally that what he really thought we should do was put it on the market at £75k less than that, to make irresistible: people would kick themselves for not viewing.
So, although we didn’t go with that agent, we did go with that price, reasoning that we wanted to sell and that we wouldn’t sell unless we got viewers.
We’ve had lots of viewers, been ghosted by a load who had seemed to be really, really positive, but also received offers, all starting about 10% below our asking price.
Similar houses remain on the market at asking prices up to £200k more than ours, and they’re not selling. Some are reducing, but mostly incrementally. Some are spookily selling the day they go up on Rightmove, which I think is a bit suspicious, all from the same agent, who is possibly considering a foray into fiction.

I dropped 25k and sold to First Time Buyers I then got an offer accepted on my new house for 15k under the asking price

Just bought for £450k a house that 9 months earlier for £575k

@CrashyTime What I find strange is that everyone seems to be feeling the effects of cost of living rises and mortgage increases, but no one seems to be able to make the connection to why their house isn't selling.

If you would not be willing/able to pay the mortgage costs for your house at your asking price, it's unlikely your buyers will be able to either. Unless of course you live in an area that has been gentrified and the demographics/earning potential of the locals has drastically changed.

We bought in August 23 with 12.5% off. Should really have gone for 15% off in retrospect.

Thing is though - you won't really get any useful answers to this question because there's no way of knowing how realistically priced anyone was in the first place.

You should also be able to get a lot of this kind of info from your agent. When agents came round to value mine they brought loads of intel about actual selling prices of similar properties compared to asking and there certainly weren't examples of anyone accepting offers at 10% under or any of those kind of figures. Accepted low offers were only at the 2% under asking sort of point, but others were selling at asking or even over. But then there were others that they said "that hasn't sold because it's over priced - I valued it at X..." And even then the "over value" was about 5% max. But this is only going to be true of where I live, you need to ask the agents in your own area.

I got just under 15% “reduction”. SE London. The house is a full reno project and the vendor agreed after much negotiation and being on the market for 6 months. It turned our the EAs had convinced him that he could get it for the price of other houses that didn’t need a reno, but clearly not! I would not have gone ahead had there not been a decent reduction, but it isnt really a reduction. It’s what the house is worth considering a full reno and to get it to modern standards. For crying out loud, his garden “office” had a massive hole in the roof and he through he could get the same as others on the street. Madness.

Exactly, people need to look at their potential buyer market, think about how much those people might earn and work out the house price that they need to sell for that allows a buyer with a mortgage to have manageable monthly payments. many people are not yet ready to take this step though because a ,lot of the imaginary money that they thought was "in" their house disappears at that point, but without actually taking this step sellers are going to just sit there for years with no buyer interest.

20% would have been better the way things are shaping up IMO.

You can't do that at all. That only works if everyone buys a house with a 100% mortgage. And for that very reason you can't define your "potential buyer market" by "how much those people might earn". How much a person earns defines how much they can borrow, but that's only a part of any of these equations.

We sold my mums house ( completed beginning of January) after we reduced the price from £440,000 to £425,000 when the buyers pulled out on the day we were due to exchange.

Although we only had a few more viewings, it generated a lot of interest and we finally accepted an offer just above the new asking price, £428,000. This sale went through fairly smoothly considering it was over the Christmas period.

Fair points, but for the average borrower with a mortgage their affordability has massively changed, a smart seller will be doing some sort of cost analysis and not just sitting there flying a kite?

@CrashyTime But what sort of cost analysis. If I do a cost analysis just on how much I earn vs price of the house I live in now, apparently I can't afford to live here, not even at the price I paid in 2005, let alone the price I'm selling for. Yet somehow I've managed just fine. There are something like 30% of people in the UK that own their homes outright, with no mortgage. People inherit, gift, downsize, save. People selling houses worth £400k for instance are rarely selling to people earning £100k a year.

Not really, just that somebody felt the asking price was a fair price for the type of property they were happy to buy.

An asking price is just an arbitrary number, just because a property is near a good school doesn't mean that someone will pay the asking price for a house, if the the asking price is too high.

We reduced by 2%, that’s what triggers the right move algorithm so it will show up on searches and get pushed out to anyone with saved searchers. I think that’s what helped us sell, as it showed willing to negotiate and also made it more visible. We sold for the reduced asking price. In south London

How much your buyer can afford now is all that counts, people earning X tend to buy flats, people earning Y tend to buy terraced houses etc. etc. the fact that mortgage applications fell to 30 year lows recently tells us all we need to know about general affordability IMO, the only solution now is house prices need to fall. 2005 was a different market, it was early in the cheap debt cycle and the banks were giving out loans to anything with a pulse, definitely not comparable to now.

London in fairly expensive area - sold at asking price, with a small reduction based on survey (less than .5 percent). However we did an off market show around and based on feedback went for a fairly realistic/keen price. Buying house at around 5% less than asking but property price was dropped from initial market ask, so arguably more depends on how you calculate. In our area, there is keen demand and very limited supply. Few sellers ‚have’ to sell and are awaiting an upturn, few sellers are leaving the area. On the other hand, affordability is challenging, particularly for lower priced (buyers of the biggest places buy cash/without selling reflecting the continuing income rise of top 5% earners I guess). I think the strategy of ‚off market‘ viewings to interested parties, then price based on feedback is good. Also just not deluding yourself as a seller! You see a few very unrealistic sellers and what happens is they wait a year, then have to sell lower than they would have.

Not this last house but one previously we loved the look of on rightmove but it was £20k over our limit , they reduced it twice by 10k quite quickly as they had a property at auction they wanted to buy and we were delighted to be able to buy at full ask on their new price - the property suited us perfectly