think our buyers are trying to take us for a ride!

[canella]

house been on the market since April - we've moved overseas so the house is lying empty. House is on the market for £175,000 and at the beginning of October after much thought we accepted an offer of £160,000. The estate agent told us 2 weeks ago that the buyers were unsure now and wanted some time to think it over - house still being marketed all the time but no other offers.

They've now come back today and said they want to go ahead with the sale but they think the house needs £20k of work done to it and they've only got £15k so they want to reduce their offer to £155,000.

Now i know the house would benefit from a new kitchen and new double glazed windows but structurally the house is sound so could be moved into without the work being done - the existing windows & kitchen are fine (we lived there for 7 years quite happily!)

so emailed the estate agent back to ask what they wanted to spend £20k on - they say its some work on the garage and crutains,carpets and decor!!!!!!!

surely thats up to them if they want to spend money on decor - think they're trying to take us for a ride? what would MN'etters do?

[goldenpeach]

I think if you live abroad it's hard to understand what is going on here. Unless your house is in a hot location, selling it now is going to be hard, not matter how nice it is. Even in big, expensive towns, like London, prices have fallen hard, there might be pockets where houses are still doing well but now that the summer is gone I see lots of properties being sold and then coming back onto the market. There are fewer buyers out there, especially for family size houses.

If you are not happy about selling for that price, rent it out and try next year, although things might even deteriorate further. Many people are in denial about how bad things are, but the economy is not recovering yet and after the elections I fear many people will be worse off as the public sector will cut jobs and slash their budgets. Even in the corporate sector many companies are doing badly and the list of bankruptcy is lengthening.

People are starting to be worried about property prices and the banks are mostly lending money to buyers with big deposits.

[theyoungvisiter]

canella - of course it's your choice. No-one is saying that it's not your option to do anything you like.

What they are saying is that it may not be a very wise option. Your buyers may have a point - you don't seem to want to hear that possibility.

(Also just to point out, their original offer was not "over 10% below the asking price" as you state. They actually offered just 8.6% off the asking price with £160, and still only 11% off the asking price when they reduced their offer to £155.

I am not mentioning this to pick holes in your maths, but because according to this summer 2009 article 11% below asking price is actually the average offer currently being accepted on houses. In the North the situation is even worse, with houses selling on average 26% below asking price.

Therefore I think your buyers were generous with their first offer, and still well above average for your region with their reduced offer, something you might want to take into account.)

[canella]

i didnt force them to make an offer on our house. i didnt force them to look our house if they couldnt afford it! no-one is forcing them to move from renting (if thats where they are).

they came to look at our house and put an offer (over 10% below the asking price) that we accepted. If they then change their mind and withdraw that would be a setback but its their choice.

But its our choice to reject their further offer on the grounds that no survey has been done and its not up to the seller of a house to pay for the decorative tastes of the buyer!

[clam]

And what your DH thinks you should get is irrelevant. According to what criteria? The fact is it's been on the market for several months and this is the only tangible interest (i.e. an offer) you've had. You can turn down any potential offers in the future if you like, but you may well end up with an empty house on your hands for many many months.
We're in November now. Not a good time to sell at the best of times, let alone a recession.

[theyoungvisiter]

Oh and the other point of course is that whoever does the survey and valuation won't be in the least impressed by the staging.

It really doesn't help if you get an asking price offer, at the end of the day, a buyer can only offer what their bank is prepared to lend them. And if the bank only thinks the house is worth £150k then you can stage until you are blue in the face, you're unlikely to get what you want.

[MillyMollyMoo]

Your husband needs to wake up and smell the coffee, unemployment is about to hit 3 million and the banks lending criteria is tightening constantly, at £160,000 somebody needs to be earning at least £30,000 with a 30% deposit just to get a mortgage, nevermind a decent rate.
Oh and there are 4 houses in the streets surrounding ours of houses to let all around the same price, if I was looking to rent I'd be having a dutch auction to see which one I could get cheapest.

[theyoungvisiter]

Canella, fair enough, and I think your point about not trusting them to try to negotiate again is a valid one.

But I think before you spend any money on staging you should get as much advice as possible about pricing. Get some valuations (even if you had several done earlier in the year get them again. You need current valuations, not ones based on the market back in the spring.) Most importantly, get several, and from new estate agents. Your existing agent isn't going to want to admit if he made a mistake and risk frightening you away to another agent.

When you get the valuations done, ask the estate agents for as much advice as possible about the state of the market, how quickly houses like yours are moving, how much buyers are trying to knock off the asking etc etc.

My concern would be that you may spend £000s staging and find that the staging was not the problem, but the price was. And you may end up wasting time and money and then accepting a low offer anyway. I may be cynical, but I can't see how any amount of staging is going to be sufficient to get you an extra £20k on a property that's been on the market for 6 months already without an offer.

For that kind of uplift you'd need a whole makeover, including a new kitchen and bathroom.

[canella]

fizzy - had to do a lot of persuading to get my dh to accept £160k - i want it off our hands but he thinks they would be getting it for a total bargain. We had lots of chats where i said to him that although he thinks we should get £175k for it, we're not getting any other offers so its obviously overpriced. He is the one who thinks we should get a house stager in and then we'll get nearer £175k for it. He's not getting a house stager in then accepting£155k!!! i understand they want to do all that redecoration (i couldnt care less what they do to the house after they buy it) but as i said before the house is structurally sound so anything they want to pay for doesnt have to be done immediately! the house we live in now needs a new kitchen cause the one isnt to our taste but i would never have expected money off the house!

We were intially going to rent it out but it was advertised for a few months with no interest - not many families in that area renting 4 bed houses!

spoke to the agent and told them we were rejecting their offer of £155 - we were sticking at £160k unless they had a survey done that indicated more work to be done. I know some of you will think we've been stupid but if they are trying to take money off it now, i dont trust them to not try it again!

[scaryteacher]

Rent it out - I rent mine out whilst overseas and so I have the advantage of the house being lived in whilst the property market sorts itself out, and somewhere to live when we go back. I employ an excellent agent to oversee the house for me and we have had no hassles in three years. It's worth doing - I let unfurnished and without white goods (as the agent recommended) and we have had 1 month without a tenant in three years.

If your mortgage interest exceeds your rent income, and there are all sorts of other things you can offset to reduce the tax bill, there isn't always tax to pay. As I have no UK income, if there was a taxable profit on the rent, then I could use my tax allowance to reduce it as well.

[Doodleydoo]

Have you thought about whether it is worth Renting it out for a while? If you don't want to sell at that price then it might be worth renting it out unfurnished for a year to have a think about it?

I am not sure if you are being UR or not tbh, I know that sounds strange but the buyers may have been to their mortgage company and not been able to raise any more money or some other reason, what I do think is ur is the excuse they have given you - if they had said actually we can't afford any more as we are at our limit it puts a different sway on things, you are pissed off because they want to redecorate and this is the reason they have lowered the price (I personally would be just as pissed off for this reason as it isn't structural or any major issue and frankly we all live in houses that sometimes don't have exactly what we want in them and then aspire to do the work......could bang on forever about it!)

Anyway hope you come up with a solution that works for you - you could change agents if you wanted but bear in mind that nothing is likely to happen now until well into 2010 as it is v quiet time of year.

[Fizzylemonade]

Having read that you would consider paying a house stager a few thousand I think you should accept the £155k on condition that a survey is done within X amount of time and that there is to be no reduction on survey.

Your house is sat empty, money tied up in it.

Maybe the person who paid £135k for the house over the road paid over the odds for it, maybe a south facing garden swung it or the possibility to extend, who knows.

It is a buyer's market. Push for a fast exchange then it is guaranteed what they will pay.

Sometimes people go away and cost stuff up, like we did (didn't offer) but worked out cost of new extension, new kitchen with appliances and new double glazing which is a real outlay. Figured house wasn't worth what the vendor was asking when we had all that to shell out.

I always remember someone on here saying to a friend "would you pay someone £5k to take your house off your hands" she replied "yes" so MN person said "well drop your bloody asking price by £5k to get the sale." Wise women (and men) on MN.

[theyoungvisiter]

"By nickelbang Mon 02-Nov-09 16:46:03
and unless they have had a survey done, they can't just agree to a price and then decide it's not worth it!"

Er, yes they can! Until you have exchanged contracts they can do anything they damn well like. You don't have to agree of course, but that's another question.

Gazumping is different, it's the original term and means someone coming in with a higher offer at the last minute, and teh vendor ditching the original buyer along with all their surveys etc.

Gazundering is a new term that comes in in a falling market - it's where the buyer waits until the whole chain has everything in place and then demands a rebate on teh price at the last minute. Rather than lose £000s on surveys, searches and removal fees etc, the vendor agrees because they have you over a barrel. It's a form of extortion really, and sometimes the whole chain bands together to agree a small discount each to avoid losing a large sum on all the searches they've done.

BUT it's not usually done at this stage in the process, and it's not usually done to a vacant posession, ie someone not moving themselves. In this case the vendor has no money to lose so they aren't blackmailing you at all, just asking nicely (or not nicely, depending on how you look at it!).

[canella]

a mix bag of responses! we already dropped the price to £175k because it wasnt selling in the first few months.

The house across from it sold in the summer after being on the market for a year at the full asking price of £135k. It was a semi with 2 bedrooms, no garage and a much smaller garden. Our house has got 4 bedrooms, a conservatory, an integral garage and its in fairly good condition (was there 4 weeks ago so i know this!)

would feel gutted to accept only £20k more than the house across sold for.

abetadad - would have taken the house off the market in an instant if they had been committed from the start. but we accepted the offer 4 weeks ago and still no survey!and now this! taking the piss in my eyes!

[ABetaDad]

canella - its a market. They made an offer and you kept the house on the market hoping for a higher offer. They then thought about it and decided they needed to offer less. Don't tell me you wouldn't have dumped them in an instant if a higher offer if it came along.

They are not behaving dishonourably. No one has signed anything and you are still mareting the house. You have the right to walk away and and they have the right to change their offer.

You have not had a better offer and that indicates your buyer really has offered top price. No one is willing to beat it. Now you just have to decide to accept or keep marketing it through the winter.

Maybe the buyer just cannot get a big enough mortgage and they really are offering al they can. Its happening a lot in the current economic climate.

[clam]

So you're prepared to pay a few thousand to a house stager to get a buyer when, actually, you already have one who wants a few thousand off.

I know it's annoying that they're trying this wheeze, but think about it in terms of what you get out of it. The house sold, done and dusted. You don't need the money for another purchase, by the sounds of it. Think I'd take the money and run, myself.

[nickelbang]

and unless they have had a survey done, they can't just agree to a price and then decide it's not worth it!

tell them to get their survey then come back with reason. FFS, why on earth would they think that you'd jsut change your mind?
that's extreme piss-taking.

[nickelbang]

isn't it gazumping?

gazunder is a chamber pot

[MillyMollyMoo]

I think it's a buyers market and I would have taken the £5k to keep the buyer personally.

[theyoungvisiter]

They are not gazundering. Gazundering is where you wait until the last possible moment when everybody is committed to moving and has spent a lot of money on the process and THEN demand a refund.

Proper gazunderers wouldn't be so naive as to offer, straight away announce the fact that they are dithering for two weeks, then ask for a fairly paltry discount for a crap reason.

These people simply sound naive and undecided. I don't think they are trying to take you for a ride - if they were they wouldn't be so cack handed about it.

[janmoomoo]

They are clearly gazundering! The estate agents should not be tolerating this behaviour. You have done the right thing (IMHO!).

[theyoungvisiter]

"i agree with singed and prettycandles that its not up to us to accept a lower prive just so they can change things to their taste."

Well that's true, but equally it's not up to them to pay X because you've decided that's what it's worth. A house is only worth what someone wants to pay for it - and at the moment they are the only people who want to pay even £155k, let alone more.

I get the sense that you are annoyed at the reason they've given for lowering their price - which is understandable but not really the issue.

If they'd given a different reason, or if they'd offered £155k from the outset would you still be annoyed? Are you ok with the idea of them walking away and possibly having to accept £155 from someone else, further down the line

I think you need to step aside from your understandable irritation over the idea of 15K for rugs, and look at the real issue which is will you get more for the house? Have other properties in the area been selling?

The fact that it's empty shouldn't really be standing in the way, unless it's in very obviously poor condition. Normally houses look bigger when empty, and the fact that they are vacant possession is a plus too.

Ask your estate agent honestly - does he think it's priced right? Have comparable houses in the area sold? How many valuations did you get when you put it on the market and where was this one - middle or top?

[displayuntilbestbefore]

to be honest, your agent should have asked what proof your buyers had for asking for such a significant knock-down on price before he came to you with it. If they do now pull out then you've probably saved yourself hassle of taking on buyers who might have pulled out later anyway as they sound pretty unreliable. If they go ahead with a survey however, just be prepared that there might be something that comes up but at least you'd know why you were reducing the price and can negotiate to just pay half of costs rather than them expect you to pay for it all - after all, the house is valued as it is, not as it would be if everything was perfect and I think a lot of buyers forget this so they see a glitch or some wear and tear and assume they are entitled to money off to rectify it when in fact the agent has taken it all into account when valuing!!