Has anyone purchased their homes by sealed bid in London?

[Gidleigh]

We need to put a sealed bid together and was curious about people's experience in this. How much above the asking do people put in ususally?

Hmmm. We won a sealed bid at the top of the market (Summer 2007). Eventually we didn't buy the house due to planning issues. I think you should be very careful about bidding above the asking price. There is always anotherhouse if you can wait for it. Speaking as someone who paid top dollar in 2007!! To answer the question there is no rule about what people put in altho' the agents are good at making you panic into bidding high. Some people have "theories" about biddin 800,100 rather than 800,000. Buying somewhere nice?

As TDiddy says, the agent will often tell you your planned bid will not win so you need to up it. Don't be bullied into increasing your offer.

We were told our bid (marginally above the asking price) would not succeed. We offered the amount anyway.

Unsurprisingly, our offer was not enough and the vendors went with the highest bid.

A month or so later and the successful bidder had to drop out for some reason. By this stage the vendors had to get moving quick as they needed to complete on where they were moving to, so accepted our lower offer.

Moral of the story = offer what you can afford, and what the property is worth, regardless of what the agent says!

I agree with the others in do not let listen too much to the EA. We recently bid on a property that came back on the market after the previous buyers pulled out & the EA told us it had previously gone for the asking price but then slipt up & admmitted it went for £20k below asking price. It went to sealed bids & we offered £20k below the asking price & so did another party but they got it as they had a larger deposit. Offer what YOU think it is worth. Good luck

Completely agree with the others - offer what you can afford, and don't worry about what anyone else thinks. We had to go to "best and final offers" for our (non-London) house in 2007 and DH was away so I had to make the decision - so I went in at £150 over asking - we got the house - but I don't know what position the other buyers were in or whether they just wanted to sell to us!

If you are in a good position (cash buyer/ in rented/big deposit etc) then put that in with your bid as even if you don't make the highest offer, your position may help.

Good luck

Thank you all for the advice. Will try to see where we go from here.. We are looking in SW london.

We bid in a sealed bid in SW London a few months ago. It was really hard deciding what to bid, because we could have afforded more (it was a 'wreck' that needed doing up, so room to manoevre) but had to decide what it was worth. And what it was worth to us.

In the end, someone who bid less than us got it - because they were in rented accomodation and we hadn't yet exchanged contracts on our sale. So its true that position counts for a lot.

We're now in rented, and cash buyers, so hoping if the same situation comes up again we'll do a lot better.

Not much on for sale here in SW London, hope it works out for you!

A wee bit of advice from the Scottish perspective (where we regularly use a "sealed bid" system: only we call it "going to a closing date"). Only offer what you think the house is worth to you. This may mean that yuo end up offering more than you needed to. Do put an uneven number, eg £136,151.

When we bought our house in Glasgow 10 years ago, I'm told our bid was higher by "the contents of a wallet". We offered something like the amount I gave above.

Despite recent hype, my own view is that the housing market will not run away from you in the short term

There are no rules. We tried to stick (like others say) to what we could afford but went to a price beyond which we would have just about reconciled ourselves to walking away.
We won by quite a bit (grr) although one of the losers tried to match it thereafter, which made us feel better. I would only really push the boat out if it is your dream house - no compromises etc.