Highest offer or cash buyer when choosing between final offers?

[kerstina]

Our house had only been on the market a week and it has gone to final offers as four people wanted to buy it . Any advice on whether it is best to go for the highest bidder or the cash buyer. What are the pitfalls either way? Would prefer it to go as smoothly and stress free as possible so would that be the cash buyer even though it is much less than highest bidder but still over asking price.

How much higher is the other offer?

I would rather not say on here but all offers were over asking price. Husband did his homework and did question the estate agent about things that concerned us . We are going to accept highest bidder. It is a risk but I guess you can’t avoid that totally anyway. We bought the house in the 90’s and it was a complete wreck. It has taken us years to get it looking lovely . So I hope the buyers can see it has been a well loved home and garden for many years . It is probably the beautiful park literally a minutes walk down the road that has sold it lol.

But that is a chain, you are still purchasing regardless of if you are at the top of it.

no chain would be you going into rental

100% this, check they are genuinely cash buyers!

Yes we might rent . Will see .

We went with highest that was the fastest proceedable as we had a house we wanted to buy. They had a mortgage prepared and a large deposit and were in rented. Even cash buyers sometimes come back and then say they want a sale to line up etc so ensure estate agents have been very clear with them.

Unfortunately, you can't submit a mortgage application until you have a specific property address to put on the form, so you can't have a mortgage in place at the start of the process.

An AIP for sure, but that's not worth much more than the paper it's printed on.

If they actually have the cash then go for that
but
id want my solicitor to have absolute truth of that

If they send a bank statement from a parent that’s not good enough. We sold to a cash buyer based on their parent buying for them. Turned out to be lies

If you have seen proof that they are first time buyers with the cash in their bank account I’d go with them.

However you said the cash is being gifted, where is the cash? If it’s with parents who are selling a second home then that is an issue.

I'd say highest bidder also. You don't know who is going to be a faffer. Once the surveys and searches are underway, any buyer can get spooked for any spurious reason - a gnat's fart in the garden or an r in the street name, cash buyer or no. That would be really frustrating if you knew you could have got a bit more money from someone else.

More important I think is the solicitor they appoint - which of course you won't know until they do. Some are amazing, some are as slow as a slow thing. It's pot luck really, so again, better to know that at least you are getting the most amount of money from the get-go.

Our cash was in an easy access savings account and ready to go.
Agree though that some say that and haven’t got it readily available.

Agree you need to know exactly where the cash is and for the EA to verify this @kerstina.

Our last sale (2024) was to a young couple who had apparently already completed on their sale and had a chunk of cash available. However, they told our EA they needed to sell a piece of land they owned in order to make us an acceptable cash offer. There was talk that this land was of interest to a neighbouring farmer, so might be sold privately.

We asked our EA to confirm this one way or another, but they were particularly inept in that respect and we ended up trying to establish the facts for ourselves (unsuccessfully).

Ultimately, they'd been lying all along - although not insofar as not having the cash. In fact they had more than sufficient to buy for cash and replace the septic tank...our EA just couldn't/wouldn't confirm this for whatever reason.

The sale did go ahead, but we were getting increasingly pissed off with our EA.

Anyway, well done on getting so much interest so quickly in this market!

We were. Not liars.

We were cash buyers and we did have the cash, so what you have "always heard" is incorrect.

I would verify whatever checks the agent does on the cash position. We had a situation where it later transpired the cash was in India and they couldn't ultimately transfer it out (or some such complications). I would also consider how wide the difference is. If the cash offer is only 5k less than the mortgaged offer then maybe, if it's 55k then maybe not.

Same, it was all in our current account.

Indeed. We’ve bought with cash twice and are about to do so again.

I was chosen above higher offers as was genuine cash buyer and showed proof of the easy access account and balance to the agents.
When I had a property to sell I definitely would have taken the cash buyer, but in that case he was a liar and the agents were crooks.

Whoever is most proceedable. I’m selling. I have a cash buyer. What they meant was they weren’t getting a mortgage. They are selling a property though so I have a chain.

If you have to sell your property to fund your purchase then you are not a cash buyer. You are only a cash buyer if you have the funds available at the time of your offer.

Now this I agree with. Until the property is sold they are not a cash buyer.

Exactly!

We've purchased five times since paying off our last mortgage in 2007, but whilst we haven't needed to borrow to buy any of those houses, we've only considered ourselves actual cash buyers once - when our sale had completed before we offered on our next home.

Not sure if we are bonkers but we accepted an offer on our house and we had our second offer accepted on the house we want yesterday! I hope everything goes as smoothly as it can but have heard it can prove very stressful. Any advice how we can be a bit more prepared to avoid it ?.Thank you for all the advice so far.

In this market I would go for the cash buyers

When you say that do you mean because it is a buyers market or because of the Iran war ? Apparently we live in a property hot spot.