ridiculous panic? please advise......

[Jeepers]

Any advice would be great. My dh and myself are sat in a pool of indecision over what to do next.

Currently we are selling our house and have had an offer accepted on another very lovely house nearby. The only downside is this house has broken through the price bracket in that street quite considerably (offer accepted at £380000, similar house sold last year for £310000, but needing alot of work doing).

Now we are not in this move to make any money and may be there for sometime (but may also have to move in three-four years time due to work). The expense of the house is making me feel quite uneasy particularly given falling house prices predicted between 15-30% which has the potential to wipe out our entire deposit of £135000.

People use arguments that as your house price falls others will too, but surely if we have no equity/ deposit left we wouldn't be ablwe to raise a mortgage in the future.

We have a number of options which I would be very interested to hear your views on:

plan a (favoured by dh) known as the 'f**k it, you're a long time dead' approach and just go ahead and hope for the best

plan b (favoured by myself) pull out of the buying altogether and rent for a while and see

plan c try and negotiate the price down. we're a bit rubbish at that sort of thing and have no idea how to handle that without really pissing people off

any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I don't deal with being hated so well!

Worse still their estate agents are complete arses so any discussions will be hellish. Also knowing me I'll probably end up offering them more money just to make things 'nice' again.

God i need to get a grip!

The system allows you to offer less. You are not tied to a price until exchange. It is normal, anyway, to renegotiate after a survey if it shows things wrong with the house. We tried to get £15k off our house after the survey and finding out the vendors had lied about something. We got £5k off and settled for that as we wanted the house and intend staying for some time.

Definitely C then B. Even if you get 5% off surely £19k of hard-earned cash is worth a little unpopularity? We had friends who have put in an offer, waited, then every time the vendor's come back said "sorry, that offer's expired, it's £xk lower now" - they're moving in next week ( as it's opposite us, though we sold to rent last August) having finally got it for 17% under asking.

Think it still broke ceiling price for street, though .

Can I just add that renting really really sucks if you haven't done it for a while. We have rented for the last year, and I hate it. The rental agents are crap, the landlord never does anything, they all treat me like I am a criminal who can't read contracts and doesn't understand anything (ffs I used to be a lawyer ) AND it is impossible to find a house you want to rent when you really need to. We ended up renting 30 miles away from where we wanted and having to store stuff for a week because the properties to rent just vanish when you need them. And if you have pets, either lie about them or prepare to never find a rental house.

It is very easy to say "Oh we'll just sell our house and then rent for a while..." and I said it too - but never again.

Our experience is the opposite but obviously that doesn't prove anything! I prefer it but only because I am too lazy to get boilers fixed/DIY done myself. We are in London so the choice is probably better. ILs want to do the same in theory but they are in Berks and are finding it difficult.

regarding house price drops...a lovely house will still be a lovely house and unless you are in a house price 'bubble' area, I reckon a lovely family house will be the least likely to come crashing down.

much more vulnerable (in my uninformed opinion) are 1 - 2 bedroom flats bought by the truckload for 110% mortgages by people hoping to rent them out.

and if in 3-4 years your equity has been diminished, then you can take a view at that stage - maybe you would be able to rent out your lovely house for a period and rent yourself at that time.

so my view would be C then A but not B.

strength of C depends partly on whether you are desirable buyers - if you have as good as sold, you are gold dust and are in a strong position; if your sale has not progressed very far, then you are less attractive as a buyer.

Scampmum - I knew someone out there would be having the opposite experience to me, just goes to show! Glad it worked out OK for you....maybe London does help? Or maybe agents just looked at me, DH, DD (6 months old) and our 2 dogs (we hid the cats) and thought they would rather rent to a single male commuter-type - happened 3 times to us.

Option c is the way forward really isn't it?

It is a lovely house and the only one that we both stood in slack jawed admiration at.

Must now scrabble some courage together and speak to the estate agents. Would the best starting point be £20000 off ?

Think we benefited from being young family (no pets) rather than gang of sharers! Hope your experience gets better or you manage to buy somewhere for a bargain price.

Oh, and definitely timing it sucked because you want somewhere to rent lined up before you agree on a completion date but don't want to sign an AST agreement before you've exchanged! We lost at least one rental property that way. Trying to sort childcare was another total arse but guess that goes for moving whichever way you're doing it...

You could always look around again to see if anything more suitable has come on the market. Then you could go back to the original vendors and say that you think you might have been overstretching yourselves in the current climate and have found something cheaper. They may be prepared to bring their price down or you could go with the other property.

plan b no question .Did you see paxman tonight?

I missed paxman. what did he say?

I'd do C, then B if C didn't work. Why on earth, in a buyer's market, would you take the risk on this property when the current owners are probably walking off with tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds in profit?

The worst thing that will happen if you piss them off is that they take the lightbulbs and the handbooks for the appliances, btw.

One final thought, Jeepers. If you get squeamish about negotiating, think about what that money means for your family, whether it's a year of nursery bills, a round the world trip, family yacht, lol...

oh crap... dh girded his loins and asked for £10000 off today. Ominous silence as the estate agents contact the chain....

so what happened?

personally, i would have told you to sling your hook and waited for you to crawl back a few days later.

then i would have raised the price by 5k!

why do polite, gentle people who wouldn't say boo to a goose suddenly think they can start actng in a rude and arrogant manner just because they're behind a cloak of anonymity?

you should be ashamed of yourself, this is not how civilised society flourishes.

people will simply just withdraw totally from the market and the whole thing will grind to a halt.

not very pleasant behaviour

stephen it will not grind to a halt at all.Prices will fall so that banks can safely lend on them again and the whole thing will be off again.

well not grind to a halt, halt. but slow down to a needless extent and people having to put their lives on hold.

my main point is that guzundering is awful behaviour.

anyway, credit crunch, my backside. we're just back to what was the norm (and v sensible) a few years ago of people not being able to get 100 - 115% mortgages.

jeepers what happened?

My understanding is that gazundering happens when most of the paperwork etc. is done and contracts are about to be exchanged. If the OP has only just had an offer accepted, I don't see a problem with offering a lower price or saying that in the current economic climate you want to look around for something a bit cheaper (although you take the risk that you may lose this particular house). When we sold our house 2 years ago, 2 different couples made offers which we accepted (obviously not at the same time), only for them to later admit they had made offers on other houses. Neither couple bought ours in the end. Until solicitors and surveys are involved, I treat offers with a pinch of salt.

Well it took a week of the sellers considering the price drop. They eventually said no, so we walked away.

We were then contacted again a week later but this time they agreed to the full price drop. Its all still in the pipeline but progressing well.

As regards the ethics of the situation... I am aware that it must have been hard for the sellers of the house but this was still very early on in the process, just 2 weeks after the offer was accepted. As someone earlier had said the solicitors/ surveys/ exchanges were simply dots on the horizon. No money had changed hands at any point

My husband also tried to make it clear when discussing with the estate agent exactly why the reduction was being requested and certainly did not act in a rude and arrogant manner. We didn't go into the process with a deliberate aim of reducing the offer, but circumstances changed.

I am sorry about any stress the price drop may have caused but I am also pleased that some of the worry & anxiety about buying this house has eased.

have you completed contracts on the sale of your current house?

We exchanged today!