Owning your own home

Walk away

Fuck me that's depressing. And if the laws of the market are to be believed at least 50% of households live somewhere worse...

After 4pm they will likely come back and ask for a further 'final' offer. Walk away.

On a side note, we could move to Margate and get an eight bed house. Fill the spare rooms with kids and the child benefit might just pay for the railcards to get to work each day.

Walk away.

(Aside: This happened to me, and I got outbid by a cash buyer anyway.)

If that's all you've got, keep your offer the same.
They'll either go with the higher priced offer (if there is actually one) or they'll accept yours.

If it's outside your budget, then so be it. There'll be other places available...

Thanks for the reality check, folks.
We can just about afford to add 5k to our budget and still be able to pay stamp duty and whatnot. Its a nice gaff so I think we're going to at least try one last option but at this point we've mentally let it go anyway.

Plenty of other stuff out there we can actually afford.

Yep, they're the tools we're using. The though part was breaking up all the concrete on top. Took a day just to locate the existing pipe

Cool, only just spied the mattock by your foot.

Wonder what the note on the toilet seat says.

I heard you were doing a group rendition of Walk Away by Cast and came as quick as I could

Good luck.
We did this once and the estate agent told me what I would have to increase my offer to on the phone after he had opened all the offers and was calling me to tell me that mine wasn't high enough. I can only assume he did the same thing to all of the people involved, I declined to increase and avoided participating in any of these from then on - there's really no reason to assume that the agent will act as an independent adjudicator.

We were asked to increase our offer as ours was second best, we just said no. We were accepted anyway. If you can't afford to up it, stick. You may be more attractive for some other reason, or the other mystery shopper may not exist.

+1 for walking away, if you make an offer that truly stretches what you can afford you won't be able to sleep for a long long time.

Well, our bid is in - we don't have to go in to credit cards after all and should hear back tomorrow morning. Not particularly hopeful but lets see.

I really want this place. Unfortunately, the agent has picked up on this but so far has been pretty straight-up about certain stuff, which might just be a ploy to gain people's trust.
A week ago, I'd have thought that was paranoid sounding.

If its still a no then we'll walk.

Just make sure that you've still got enough after your max bid to require the house, fix the chimneys which the previous owners had bodged, sort out the wet rot the survey shows up, etc...

That has to be the lesson of this thread so far.

The agent did this to us. We upped our offer to our max and got it in the end. In retrospect I doubt there was another bidder so we ended up paying 20 grand more which hurts a bit. On the plus side the flat is now worth 80 grand more a year later if zoopla estimates are to be believed.

I really want this place.

There will always be another place.

I had a pretty close look at it and tried to not get too caught up in how nice it looked and actually pay attention to stuff surveyors would look at. On the surface, it was very, very clean - the roof, gutters and windows looked to be in good nick and the pointing was tidy etc.
Our current place is falling apart so things that are even in mildly good shape are immediately apparent.

Obviously I couldn't get in to the loft so fuck knows what's going on in there.

Amanda, I'm delighted to say Halifax have now issued your formal
mortgage offer. Rgds

yay! solicitors need to do their bit...

if zoopla estimates are to be believed.

I don't think they are. Can be +/- 20% IME

I'd be well angry if I found out I'd be done out of £20k.

We didn't get it. Some cunt offered 350.