Reducing offer price on a house....
 

Has anyone here ever reduced an offer on a house that has already been accepted?

With the current state of the market, I'm very tempted to leave the sale going through for a while longer and then reduce the offer we have made on a house.

Is this legal? I am sure that if the market was to suddenly turn then the Vendors would have no problem in asking for more, but can this work both ways?

It is legal and you can do it. I did it a few weeks from completion when I bought my current house as the seller mislead me regarding planning permission for a fence. The price got dropped by £10K (I wanted £20K but accepted the gesture).

When the seller hasn't done anything wrong, they may be tempted to walk away and if you are serious you need to accept that.

Steve

How would you feel if someone did the same to you? If it happened to me I'd tell the buyer to get stuffed :D

Depends if you want to sell a house that's in a falling market, if you tell me to get stuffed the house goes back on the market for another 3 months min, and may lose even more.

TBH I couldn't care less how they feel about it, as like I said if the market suddenly turned around I bet my offer suddenly wouldn't be enough anymore. ;)

Going to bite my tongue and walk away from this topic.

they call it gazundering Gazundering - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TBH I know what I think of it and the people who do it but it all depends on if the house was realistically priced for the current market or not in the first place and if you are paying a fair price & how much is at stake, what the house is worth to you as if they say no are you prepared to spend another few months finding another house etc.

Hey, if you're happy screwing with people's lives, do it. It's not like, in these tough times, their financial security might hinge on your decisions.

And if you're going to do it, why not do it now rather than putting them over the barrel at the last minute?

I think you have two choices. Paying the price you agreed to pay, or pull out altogether. Morally speaking as opposed to legally.

I'm selling my house at the moment and the market is crap so you have to pass on any loses to the next sale but if its all done before hand and everyone is happy its not soo bad. If i accepted an offer and by the time it came to exchange they dropped it i would tell them bollocks, rather sell it to someone else at a further loss than be cocked about by some ****. they would be the ones losing a grands worth of search/valuation/solictors fees

Says it all really :mad:

Why edit my post?


Does anyone really care about who they buy or sell houses from? Surely what matters most at the end of the day is how much money it costs or makes you.

Sorry cookie, it's not something I would do. My conscience would not let me. :)

I haven't done or decided anything, I'm just throwing ideas about. :)

Have to agree with RB5Scott buyers or sellers that muck around with the price once agreed are a pain and walk away. I did the same when I moved house just over 2 years ago.
Put an offer in for a house, agreed price, then the price went up by 2K, said no waited for a week and then the price went back to the orig agreed price. Didn't feel happy with the seller doing what he did, so walked away and bought a different house.
That house then got advertised by a different estate agent at £10K less than what I offered, and was eventually sold for £13.5K less than what I offered as by then he needed a quick sale due to their circumstances !
Good move on my behalf and silly move on the sellers part for trying to be clever !

Richard

Its a buyers market at the mo' . . .

Unless your original offer was a cheeky low offer (in which case I'd be happy I got a bargain anyway) then I would consider reducing my offer at a late stage. Chances are that the vendor has got a new place to go to and losing his sale would feck things up for him, so the odds are they would proceed with the lower offer.

However, if the vendor's new purchase relied on them getting a certain amount for theirs in order to proceed, then it could backfire and they might be pull out.

Its the gamble you take.

Happens all the time in business - upwards in a rising market and downwards in a falling market. No difference here - you need to feel you've paid a fair price ultimately - if it's now worth less than when you made your bid, you're well within your rights to drop the price. I'm sure the seller would rather you did that than just walk away.

Good luck

Gordo

Best thing to do is go to them and say you can only get a mortgate for say £5k etc less than what you have offered. Its an easy way to seem genuine. The problem with the housing market is you can change your mind at any point up until signing of the contract, so if you suddenly decided you didn't want to buy and pulled out there is nothing anyone can do. This is the proper state of the housing market now as most sales ending cancelling so the housing company I work for only start proper work with a completed contract :)

I'm not :D
This is one of the many things that are wrong with today's society :mad:
IMHO, people who do this have no morals or ethics. It's totally BANG out of order. You've agreed a price. Stick to it.

IMHO, the only occasion where lowering your offer could be acceptable is if part of the agreement (such as fences etc) has not been upheld.

If it were me, I would tell you to get stuffed.

I'm prepared to be infracted for this, as decency is one of the things I hold dear.

Dan

Would agree with that.

I believe in what goes around, comes around. Try to screw someone over now, and somewhere down the line someone will do it to you.

All I was doing was highlighting the nub of the matter in that money is all and people's feelings simply don't count.

Ironically you then emphasise this in your additional comments about money being what matters most.

Fair enough - if money matters most to you, irrespective of what damage that might do to others, then go for it. And if you want to drag it out a bit as per OP then that's up to you.

I happen to think it's morally reprehensible but so what? You asked for opinions, well that's mine. dl

Seems like quite a few people here are getting emotionally involved in what is, in fact, a purely commercial transaction...

Until you've exchanged contracts, neither party is under any obligation to the other. That's what exchanging contracts is for, and why it's in both parties' interests to get on and do it without delay.

Simply reducing your offer for no other reason than to save a few quid would be legal but, IMHO, foolish. It's guaranteed that you'll upset the seller, and of course you run the risk that they'll pull out. You need to be sure you can find some other property on which you'll get at least as good a deal.

If the seller is taking a long time to exchange, then you'd be well within your rights to threaten to reduce your offer unless they've exchanged by a particular date. Of course, you need to be fully prepared to actually do this and to pull out if necessary.

We're house hunting at the moment, and if we put in an offer on a house then that's final, barring any parts of the deal not being upheld. I would fully expect the seller to tell us to take a running jump, buyers market or not, if we decided to change the offer.

Even if they did accept the change, I would feel bad about it, hence why I'd not change the offer in the first place.

I'd say it's even worse if the change of offer comes fairly late in the process, as the sellers would have been expecting price X and are being asked if they'll accept price Y. It strikes me as the buyer being greedy. If you have put in an offer you think is fair, why change it later? If your financial situation has changed and this is causing the change in offer, perhaps you shouldn't be purchasing a house.

Perhaps I'm wrong, having never purchased a house, and perhaps it's just how it works over here, but don't you sign on an offer, and thus enter into a legally binding contract at that point, therefore, changing the offer would break the contract.

As above. If it has taken ages you could potentially get a second survey done and use that to say the value has gone down (if it has) but really, assuming the survey has been done ok and the mortgage people are happy then there isn't really a way to make this look good.

We held off making an offer until we were happy with the market and were right to do so, survey came in at 5k less than the seller wanted.

5t.

Not here in England. You make an offer, and the seller accepts or declines it. You then typically get a survey done, perform local searches and draw up the legal paperwork, and then (and only then) do the two parties exchange contracts.

What this means is that the buyer enters into a contract with the seller to buy the property at a fixed price on a fixed date, and the seller enters into a corresponding contract to sell the property on that date and at that price. It is only at this point that any legal obligations are entered into.

It's not that unusual to attach conditions to an offer - for example, a requirement that the property be immediately removed from the open market and no other potential buyers be allowed to view it. There would be nothing wrong (IMHO) with making an offer conditional on exchanging contracts by a particular date - then if that date passes, you'd be well within your rights to review your offer in the light of market conditions at the time.

This thread is a good measure of who to do business with and who to avoid!

I think we in England should adopt the Scottish way of selling houses.

Unless something becomes highlighted within the survey to make the offer changeable {structural damage, planning permission issues etc} then it should stay as it is after all when the offer is made and the point of acceptance reached everyone is happy witht he price, second negotiations should only happen for proper reasons not greed, the market may well be afalling but if you cannot accomodate that within your offer knowing the average house takes X weeks to sell {it used to be about 11 weeks} then it's a bit sad.
House prices will pick back up and stabalize again and unless you are buying to do up and sell then it shouldn't really matter paying the figure you agreed initially.

Not that I would, but if I was buying in this market, I would specify how long my offer was valid for.

There are people who wait untill just before the exchange to make a lower offer hoping the seller is desperate to get rid or has found another house and simply cannot wait to move. Someone tried it to me once and I refused to sell them the house full stop, even at the original price but the art is do do it in a way that does not wind up the seller so you can still increase the bid to get the house after.

But in Scotland, the buyer has no idea whether they've actually got the house until the closing date - nor do they have any way to judge what's an appropriate bid, given that other bids are kept secret. And don't buyers have to perform searches and surveys on any property they're interested in, before they even put in a bid?

The system is heavily loaded in favour of the seller; whatever its flaws, I can't help but feel the English system is fairer.

Thats the problem with the housing market. everything just takes too long to go through. Even with no chain on either side you will be looking at 3 months to complete and 3 months in this market is probably around another 5 grand fall but you get smart arse's thinking they can go for 15+ grand reductions.

Why can't it take 2 weeks to exchange when there is no chain and everything is already in place, there can't be that much paperwork!