Feeling sick about amount we offered for house... is changing the offer unwise? (Scotland)

[geezahoose]

We live in a 'hot spot' area where property has been selling for substantially over the home report valuation over the last year.

Last week we had an offer accepted on a house locally - we offered 20% over the home report/survey valuation. We were able to do this because our buyer offered 25% over for our property. I think we offered so much out of a combination of desperation and frustration about missing out on previous properties after we'd offered what we thought was a 'realistic' price...

However, I am now feeling sick about this. It's an insane amount of money (we'll have none left over) and it'll make the house we are buying the 'most expensive' one in the (council/ex-council) neighbourhood. (Annoyingly, if the property we offered on had been one of the privately built ones on the next road over, our offer would be less insane compared to recent sales.)

Is it worth asking our solicitor about reducing our offer by about 5k (this would only be around 3%)? We could say that we are willing to pay the original price if need be but were wondering if the sellers would accept that slight reduction? I know this is bad form & there's a risk of them bolting, but it's making me so incredibly stressed.

Again, we only just had the offer accepted last week so it's still early stages - I wouldn't want to reduce the offer at the last minute.

Any words of wisdom? I feel so stupid!

Your solicitor will probably have to pull out of acting for you as well, if my conveyancing knowledge isn’t totally out of date.

Yep

www.lawscot.org.uk/members/rules-and-guidance/rules-and-guidance/section-f/division-c/guidance/gazumping-gazundering-and-closing-dates/

I wouldn’t risk it. Not for £5k. In the grand scheme of things you’d be pretty foolish to chance it just because paying £5k less would ease temporary anxious feelings a bit.

Some people (my DH) feel huge swathes of anxiety when paying for a large purchase. He’s not tight, it just makes him anxious while he wonders if he’s paid too much, has he got it too cheap. Will he regret it, will something go wrong etc.

We live in edinburgh so the market is always good. We accepted what we considered quite a cheeky counter offer from the seller on our house because we really wanted to stop it going to closing dates because we wanted in quickly and I was heavily pregnant. We had sold our place already and lost out on several properties where we had offered really significantly over home report.

We had this house and three others to make offers on. Chose this one, paid the (cheeky) counter offer to secure it and to be honest now that a few years have passed and we can go and snoop on what people paid for the other options we had lined up, I’m just glad we pinned this one down for what we did. All went at a good 20/25k over what we would have offered, and our offers were significantly over the home reports. So all were in line with what the seller asked for on this property. It probably wasn’t that cheeky a counter offer... they just knew better than us.

So while we thought we overpaid for this house out of panic, we didn’t. The market would have out priced us if we had let it go to closing.

If someone came back and reduced their offer on any properties we have sold, I reckon we would pull out and put it back on the market. It would make me feel unsettled and anxious about what they might change their mind on next. I would sense doubt, assume they were potentially going to waste my time or create issues down the line and I would just pull out to save myself the drama.

Sorry