Owning your own home

Tell them to fuck off - they have the bid you’re comfortable with.

If there is another buyer, you’re bidding against an unknown quantity. If there isn’t, you’re just throwing money away.

A third vote for telling them to fuck off - it's literally purely designed to extract the maximum from you, and you've already bid what you're happy with ('happy'...)

We did this for our current house. It was marketed way too low, there was a huge amount of interest and it went to closed bids.

It was the perfect house in the perfect road for us and we decided on a price that we were happy to pay. We didn't make it a round multiple of 5 or 10. In my mind that made it more likely to win if some had offered say 100k or 105k as we would have had 101 or 106k (for example).

We won and were over the moon despite paying over the odds. 6yrs on the house is worth much more than that anyway now (that may not be the case if buying now though).

We must have been the first to view our house and it was such a relief to finally find somewhere which ticked all the boxes. It's a hard process and tied to many emotions, therefore we went in at the asking price. In hindsight we wished we went in 5-10% under and negotiated up*, but I think we just wanted the whole process to be over. Estate Agents know this and know how much peace of mind is worth.

*There was nothing actually wrong with the house and we got lucky only using the automated/desktop valuation with the bank.

It's too late to tell you this but going in 10k above from the off was pretty punchy unless it is a fairly high value house.

In these situations in the past I've topped my offer up by 2k as a gesture of goodwill whilst also explaining my previous offer was at the top of my affordability.

In this situation I probably wouldn't tell them to fo actually because 1) it's an open goal for your opponent and 2) they might think you are a pain in the arse to deal with.

What you now need to flush out is whether the other guy wants it more than you. I'd probably top it up by an obscure offer by something like £2,250.

If the other guy offers another ten then they want it more than you but it'll be bitter sweet as you've just cost them 20k odd than they thought they were getting it for a few days ago.

Good luck the whole process is a shit show presided over by cunts without any sort of ethical compass.

Likewise, we 'won' a bidding war and I know we paid the upper end, rather than getting a deal. But two years on we have no regrets as we got the house we wanted.

I'm considering telling them only to come and ask for my bid if the other buyer puts in an offer higher than what we've already offered.

Sounds reasonable - you already have the highest offer, let the other buyers beat it transaprently if they want then you can resond similarly.

I don't really get this approach - doesn't this just give the EA information that you're prepared to raise your offer, therefore they will of course ask you to? Why do you think they will be 'transparent' about the other bidders? Either stick with your offer if you're happy with it or go higher if you're prepared to.

When my mother sold the family house she did the give me one offer above asking and thats it, and then went with the highest. Would have been the thing to do bidding wars, but she didn't want to.
Loads of money anyway as swiss city center.
One week later someone rang the doorbell and offered a huge sum on top of the price she had agreed on with someone else, as they didn't get that there only was one round of bids. She declined.

Its a shit game, but if you really want a place and are sure that it's the house for you, going along seems to be inevitable.

It's like Ebay, only bid as much as you're actually willing to spend on it. If you end up offering more than the bank will mortgage you're going to have to top up with cash. If some mug wants to pay £20k over asking in this economy, let them.

Hear hear!

There is no mechanism for knowing if the other bid is real or fake (Bill in accounts offered £3.50) or knowing how much it's actually for other than the estate agent saying so. Anyone who trusts an estate agent to tell you the truth is in cloud cuckoo land.
ALWAYS BE PREPARED TO WALK AWAY.
sorry for shouting but the whole game of house buying is a fucking mess.

A friend bought a house recently and he said when they went to view it the seller said they were only accepting offers of 20 percent over asking. I was like your off your head and Id have told them to fuck off.

And 20 percent was 40k.

In many ways those who live up north are in a fortunate position house prices are such good value compared to their southern counterparts.

My house in Wanstead would probably be 250k in vast swathes of the Midlands and the north.

Some bloke in my road who I know pretty well now ended up paying 1.126m for his house a year ago and it was originally on for offers over 1.025m. So he had to go over 100k over to secure it, and the double whammy was the bank valued it at 1.1m so he had to find the 26k in cash.

This is the same bloke who's mortgage payments are going to jump to 6 grand a month in a few months time.

He's a thoroughly nice bloke tho.

I feel for @hazzelfrazzel having been through summat similar. There may be no other bidder. You could tell them to do one, and they prob wouldn’t tell the other bidder you’ve pulled out either. It’s sick how houses are sold here and the power estate agents have in this gross process.

You could also go way over asking now and offer whatever in the knowledge you can pull out at anytime so feel free to do that too cos the sellers are also fuckbags for doing this. Negotiate again at a later point when their move is up in the air.**

Equally gross but this is what the whole system creates. It needs regulating big time. Labour should stick it in their manifesto.

**edit - and feel free to look for something else in the meantime.

While everyone is saying “fuck it” there is always someone who won’t.
We did blind bids and won ours. Mortgage valuation agreed and we have lived in it happily ever after as we knew we could afford it.

If you go too high you won’t get a mortgage, which is kinda a safety net anyway.

If your hearts in it I’d say go nuts, let the market (mortgage) decide.

Yeah, we'd got similar feedback from a mortgage broker who was tasked with assessing our affordability this morning. Took 1 look at the listing and said "well that looks overpriced already, you might struggle to get a mortgage on that".

It's semi detached with a fantastic large garden in an area where there are many detached homes with less good gardens. Most people and the market value a detached with a small garden much larger, but I'm not a detached house snob. Perhaps letting the mortgage market decide is where this will go. If a mortgage provider isn't willing to lend against it at that value, then it's also clearly too big a risk for me.

I think it's just very hard to predict what a house will sell for. In my mind it's more about what you decide you want, what you can afford, and then supply and demand as well.

The EA has agreed not to force me to bid if the other buyer doesn't, so they'll give me a call if they get an offer, and then I'll give them the number I'm willing to spend.

I will update the thread when I can, as it seems to have generated some interesting debate. It has been really interesting to hear different perspectives, as always!

Great piece of advice I had on here, was that the purpose of getting an offer accepted was just to secure permission to buy the house in due course, remember you're not legally bound to pay your initial offer at exchange.

So really just go for it [within reason] just to secure it and beat your competitors, then negotiate it down to your real price when the lower mortgage valuation comes through and the sellers have found their dream home. This will undoubtably piss people off, but it's the truth.

The EA has agreed not to force me to bid if the other buyer doesn't, so they'll give me a call if they get an offer, and then I'll give them the number I'm willing to spend.

The EA's relationship is with the seller, and it is in their interest to squeeze as much out of the sale price as possible to maximise their % fee. I would take everything they say with the largest pinch of salt going.

I don't know enough about the current market but read this about mortgage approvals being down and this about 2023 home sales being the lowest for a decade; it seems to be a buyers market (if you can get a mortgage offer) at the moment, and I would have thought that asking prices would be getting driven down rather than up? Are their any recent sales in the area you can benchmark against?

Either go wild to secure the property as above and deal with the inevitable fallout when you try to negotiate down to your initial offer or potentially lower if your broker's advice is correct, or hold your nerve and be prepared to walk away.

This is also great advice.
Remember, initiated the game, you only play by everyone’s rules.

https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/65482948/?search_identifier=42a3aca97e8f06797cf043dbeb1420bffd007084bfca5ca993c57b1afd4d4404

Grain Tower is back up for sale, anyone fancy a project/money pit?

This guy wild camped there overnight - looked pretty intimidating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqEXp-1vPMY

I wonder if you'd be allowed to actually do much to

Probably not, then would you be allowed to restore the road/get services out to it? You could generate your own power but desalination plants are pricey...

I note that @andyp has tagged it - see 3m 51s ish
.

Update on the blind final best offers from yesterday... We put in an offer 8% above asking price. I was really confident we'd get it, but we actually didn't!

I feel completely fine about our offer and therefore with not being the winning bidder. My wife is also happy with what we offered, but is a lot more gutted than me to have missed out.

Ah well, on to the next one!

I've been waiting for someone to suggest I helped build it.