Apparition

Selling our house, 3 weeks to go 'til completion date.
Today we hear that due to some details brought up in the survey they had done , our purchasers, want us to drop the selling price by £8,000!
Now these details are not valid complaints. They are covered by building regs and planning permission etc. All above board. Work was done 5 years ago.
Basically we have told them to get stu$$ed.
What would you do in a case like this...we hold our breath now and wait to see if they back down or back out !

boxst

Hello

Unfortunately it is quite common to find something trivial in the survey and then try it on. You may beed to negotiate and actually drop some money. Sad, but true.

Steve.

OllyK

Pull out on them, take it off the market, put it back on in a week or so and if they approach you tell them the price has gone up by 50%, non-negotiable.

I'd accept a few hundred quid haggle over minor issues, but they are having a laugh. Same thing happened to the misses' parent a couple of months ago. They said fine "we are pulling out then", they backed down rather quickly.

End of the day you have to weight up how much you can afford to drop or if you would rather wait and see if you can find somebody prepared to pay. House prices aren't exactly crashing at the moment

Apparition

Well we'll see what tomorrow brings, can't understand why they outbid other interested parties then decide they want a lower price.... to$$ers

Apparition

Olly, thats what we've done, told them we aren't moving on the price. If they want to upset the entire chain then so be it.

fast bloke

Ask them for the report that shows the house is worth 8k less or needs 8k of work done. Reject their offer and when they resubmit their initial offer, refuse it and ask them for another 8k. Given the current market you should get slightly more if you hang on for a few weeks anyway.

(btw - if you house is worth 2 million quid or something, disregard this post and take the offer

p@ul

Yes m8 they are!
I had this exact same thing 2 weeks ago,they got in a bidding war with 2 other buyers and i ended up getting 5k more than i had it on the market for
Anyway they did the same thing,came back with it needs this and that so i said i will do what i can on the list (im a builder) they said er.. ok but want it guaranteed,then they asked me to replace the front 3 windows?i said they are ok, but they wanted upvc like i had put in the rest of the house!
They asked for a 5k reduction and they would do them once they had moved in! yeah right! i got them a price off my suppliers for 1.5k fitted and said thats what its gonna cost you not 5k but im not dropping by anything take it or leave it,theres 2 others offering me more than i had it on the market for ring the estate agents when you've finished messing around
Basically they rang back next day and (touch wood) i move next friday!!!!

RON

A lot of people nowadays seem to see sellers as 'fair game' which is crap, they wait til you're fed up with waiting for stuff to happen, then assume that you'll be willing to drop the price just to get to the end of it, totally crap way of dealing if you ask me, would you buy a car, and the day before you collect it tell the seller you want the price dropped, NO!!! so why do it with a house!
There are a lot of greedy people out there, so beware.

We put our old house on the market 15 months ago, we have no mortgage, just about (fingers crossed) to exchange/complete, after all that time, we got 15k less than we started at, and it's costing us £200 a week in lost interest alone!!!!! BUM!

Puff The Magic Wagon!

iTrader: (2)

Agree - trying it on

We put our house on the market in London, held out for what we wanted with the people that wanted our house (which was 10k under asking) & they knew we were on the cosh for the house we wanted.

12 hours b4 exchange they asked for a £5k reduction in price based on a seriously over-inflated price for some chimney pointing.

Took great pleasure in telling the estate agent that if we lost our house, then they for sure would never be able to buy ours.

We bought the house we wanted...

Surprise surprise

r32

They must be trying it on, however my daughter has just been in the same situation and the buyers did back out. Really screwed everything up too .......

Let us all know how you get on...
STEVE......................

ProperCharlie

trouble is that it's more of a buyers market at the moment. depending on what your place is worth, it may be better to negotiate than risk the deal going belly up. most buyers expect to negotiate something off. when i bought my place (18 months ago) i got 5k off the offer price - i think i could have got more (there were quite a few problems), but i was worried about losing the place as there weren't any similar properties on the market at that time. if i was buying now i would push for a harder bargain, as properties towards the top of the local market aren't selling. maybe different where you are, mind.

Leslie

We had someone try that some time ago. As someone advised on here, we put it back on the market immediately and within 1 day the original buyer first of all was complaining at us for doing that and then offered the original price again the next day.

As you say it is a try on and you just have to call their bluff.

Les

milo

tell them to f-off! they've paid for the survey - if they pull out now, they lose that money, plus probably solicitors fees too. its common for people to try it on like that after a survey.

it there was something legit, fine, but as u say, it's not valid.

u did the right thing imo.

MattN

How do you know you complete in 3 weeks? You only get a completion date after you have exchanged, if you've exchanged then there's **** they can do. If you haven't then you will only have an expected completion date which is just a random date plucked out of the air (normally used by people to make their story seem more dramatic).

Dapster

If your buyers are posting this on SN somewhere, we'd all be saying "try it on, you may get away with it, and if not, just pay what you always agreed to pay".

There are no rules here. It's the laws of supply and demand. One of you needs the deal more than the other, and this little game will expose who it is. If you can take the risk, then tell them to stick it. If a delay or dead deal will totally screw up your plans and loose you the dream house you've got lined up, you may take a different view.

Esoteric Beast

Well we have reached a compromise, agreed to meet slightly more than half way in our favour, they have signed their contracts now , so hopefully that is an end to it.

Thanks for all your comments.

Matt....... we have always had a completion date in mind because the people we are buying off are deffo moving out on the 29th July. We have been in this chain since way back in April, so everyone has known from day one that that is the date we are aiming at. Everyone has has loads of time to sort themselves out, thats why we know this is deffo a try-on.

Thanks once again .