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As you say, how long is a piece of string.
My view is that if it's something that you could have picked up from the viewings or would expect from a property of that age/state of repair then a post-offer reduction is a bit cheeky. If it it could only be picked up by surveyor/expert and is unexpected then fair enough, try for a reduction.
People can be strange though, they've agreed a fee and aren't budging or maybe they have a bottom line figure for their next purchase and won't go lower. It's tough to make a call, you can probably push for lower but you may not get it.
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1.5%? What is the £ value?
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It's all negotiable until you have exchanged contracts. Sometimes a buyer will essentially be saying to the seller, my offer of X was based on certain assumptions including that no (or minimal) work needed to be done, now that we've had a survey we can no longer afford X because we need to spend Y on the work so we can now only offer Z (often being X-Y as a starting point).
It depends how much the estate agent is on your side, how much the sellers need to achieve a certain price, and whether you're willing to play hardball. We negotiated on our purchase and the agent phrased it to the sellers as "the absolute max they can afford to spend is X" which wasn't exactly true, but it worked.
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aggi
Howard
Danimal
@kkg337
Can I have a sense check from someone? We're close to purchase on a house which had a few things come up in the survey that we had looked into further by specialists - which ended up with us asking for a ~1.5% reduction on purchase price. These were things recommended by (for example) gas safe engineer/electricians as 'requiring urgent remedy' as well as a few bits of work to address condensation in the loft and minor penetrating damp.
Firstly - how reasonable is it to expect a reduction for such things? I know the answer is ultimately how long is a piece of string/how badly do we want the property - but we are trying to act in good faith, but without screwing ourselves.
Secondly - the estate agent has come back with a "non-negotiable" final figure which is way off from the reductions we asked for - "non-negotiable" is just estate agent guff right?
1st time buyers so don't know if the estate agent is just twisting the screws or if we're being unrealistic. We've had 2 fall through so really cba to lose this one.