Offer on first house

Only offer less than asking if you wouldn't mind a buyer that really wants it to swoop in and take it from you.

Otherwise, work out what it's worth. Google "house value estimator" to find things online to do this, if I recall correctly zoopla has a half decent one. Then you can offer what it's worth.

If it's a really slow market you can probably afford to go low and sound them out.
 
depends on the area uptake of houses.

AS mentioned above offer less if your prepared to lose it.

I saw a house early april, i was 4th in the viewings and i just went in at asking price as its our first house and the market down here is most crazy, bidding wars etc.
 
House next to my sister's went for about 15% over asking price so there isn't any hard rules. As mentioned above, if you don't mind loosing the house offer 10% under. If they get another offer closer to asking price then prepare to loose!
 
I prefer to use Zoopla, it has much more info.

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/de...07db8383c9776a6af9401029e#mU5bacogRBWVWJq7.97
http://www.zoopla.co.uk/house-price..._types=all&sold_price_years=1&so=date&sd=desc

From the Zoopla website it appears to be £20,000 to £40,000 over priced.

Like what the others have said it depends on if you really want the house and are prepared to pay the asking price.

It also depends on the area and the market conditions. The house down the road at 59 was listed for sale in January 2014 and sold in October 2014. Obviously there can be circumstances which can delay a sale, but it helps to armed with local info when making an offer.
 
Just had a look on other websites such as the land registry calculator http://houseprices.landregistry.gov.uk/price-calculator and it shows as ~£157,000. The best thing to do would be look at a lot of the price estimators, remove anonlymlous results and then take an average. It's very similar to what the estate agents would have done to value it. Depending on whether the vendor has delusions about the value, or whether they're after a quick sale, could make a big difference either way, but it's likely the agent will have put £5-10k on the value at this point to make the mkstt people who fall in love with it/are desperate.

It's also worth bearing in mind if any significant renovations have taken place, as this will of course have an effect on value too - something the online calculators can't predict.
 
Indeed the online valuations are only really of value to use as a benchmark of what is happening in the area rather than actually putting a value on a given house, considering what may have happened to an individual property. It also depends on the volume of statistical data; some areas with very few sales can be hard to value.

Still worth looking at though to get a feel for whether something is massively out of whack. You've got to bear in mind that there will always be a degree of flux depending on how negotiations go so e.g. a property that is sold for £150k may easily have sold for £140k or £160k depending on the individuals involved. Our current house is a case in point; we would have paid £15k more for it if we'd had to. What this means is you need to get a lot of data to smooth out such variances.
 
I hope nobody minds my registering just to pop my head in to add to this topic. I developed an extension for chrome to help with just this process by pulling in relevant data from the Land Registry and displaying it in an easy to interpret format.

As well as showing you the previous sales of the property, and others in the same street, it will give you a rough estimate of the current value by doing the same calculations as the land registry price calculator - it does this not just for the last sale, but also the previous sales, and will do the same for the other addresses too.

Looking at the listing with the extension installed, I can see the £157k valuation just by opening up the pop-up window. But I can also see that it is valued at £128k based on just the 2001 sale price of £76k. By switching to the addresses of the other houses, I can see that the valuations based on their previous sale prices all come in at about £110-143k, adding weight to the notion that the asking price is over the top.

No. 54 sold for £128k last march (giving it a current value of £131k), and 59 sold for £142k in october giving it a current value of £144k. Nos. 44 and 61 both have two previous sales, and the 2nd sale of both were within 5% of the valuation that the price calculator gives based on the sale price before. However, the 2011 price of this house was 23% above that value, suggesting that the current owners we're a bit gung-ho in paying £150k.

The extension also tells me that the council tax record for the property does not have an improvement indicator on it (or rather doesn't tell me - it will flag it up if it *is* there) suggesting that there hasn't been any significant renovations (none involving planning permission and considered by the council as potentially increasing the value of the house).

And, it also tells me that when the house sold in 2001 for £76k, that was about average for a semi-detached in the area - but when it sold in 2011 for £150k, that was a fair bit above the average price of a semi detached in the area, again suggesting they may have paid more than they should have done in hindsight (i.e. £150k for a house that is statistically still only worth £150k four years on). Of course, there may have been renovations at that point - the house has obviously had a new porch and windows at some point.

I can also check out graphs of the Land Registry's data in the area, so I can see that the number of sales per month in the area averages about 250 for the last few years, so I'd say that's a big enough sample size to be comfortable with.

As other replies have pointed out, using any online calculator can only give you an idea, and much depends on the market conditions at the time of any sale, but I designed the extension to let you do it quickly and easily, as an initial sanity check, and provide additional information and ways of looking at the data to give you insights and raise questions that otherwise would take much more time to get to.

It will also let you put the listing on "watch", where it will automatically notify you whenever the status or asking price changes which I find very useful.

It's free, and you're welcome to install and use it if you think it could be helpful here.
 
The house we have bought was up for £165k and we offered £155k . It got turned down and we eventually came to an agreement at £160k. Kinda wished we held out lower but we love the house and sometimes ya heart wins over.
 
Hmm I've moved house twice in 4 years now. Both times house hunting my mortgage broker and my estate agent said people generally offer full asking price in current market, or offer minus legal and estate agent fee's. So maybe 5% less. Had 5 houses around me go up forsale, all sold within 2 - 3 weeks. With the exception of one who priced themselfs £30000 higher than the identical house next door. . . .

In short if you find the house you want it might not pay to haggle too much. Just check something like zoopla current house value guide to give you an idea.

House I'm currently in was listed as offers between £215k - £230k. I offered the low £215k which was actually rejected anyway. Offered £220, offer was left on the table while they had an open day on the house. Open day offers hit £220k according the estate agent. . . . So they offered it to me as I was ready to move. Annoying. I do think I overpaid by that £5k, but i'm extremely happy now. Been there a year. Just as an example :-)
 
I paid £187,500 on a £190,000 listed. Sometimes you just want to secure it as they don't come up often in the area that you want.
 
I paid £118k on a £125k list.

Initial bid was £114k, it took a lot of persuasion for me to go that low, as I felt it was a bit cheeky. But we were first time buyers in a good position, they were eager to move out and it had been on the market for a few months already.

Gauge the market, how long has it been up, always go in lower than what your max is IMHO
 
The one I am buying at the moment was up at 287500 and we went in at asking, then they had 7 offers at asking. They asked for final offers, we went back in at 290000, and got it :)
I was not confident with there being so many offers on the table, but it seemed to work out! It was my first real private purchase, as I bought a house from my parents ages ago before going back into rented, so was very nervous about the whole thing!
 
We just had our first offer accepted, house listed for £149,000 we offered £135,000. We offered what we thought the house was worth and weren't willing to budge.
 
We paid asking price for ours in the end.

Annoyingly (for the seller) the house was on the market for about a year without the sale price being adjusted. So we paid asking price at 210k when everything around it was selling for 225k.

At the last minute the seller cheekily asked for an extra 10-15k (conveniently to bring it in line with other properties in the area). His estate agent however mistakenly told us the seller was desperate for the money from the sale to invest into his new business, so we took a punt on the fact he couldn't afford of our offer to fall through and told him to do one.
 
johnny6 said:
So we paid asking price at 210k when everything around it was selling for 225k.

At the last minute the seller cheekily asked for an extra 10-15k (conveniently to bring it in line with other properties in the area).
Click to expand...

If someone tried that with me, my response would be that they have so many hours/days to complete at the agreed price, otherwise my offer was being revised down by 10-15k.

One thing I can't abide is being messed around. The house would have to be truly special and unique for me to put up with that sort of behaviour.
 
I wouldn't go as far as saying the property was special it's a bog standard post war ex council house, however it is in a quiet area with good schools (which my wife informs me is VERY important) and nice neighbours. Plus the council are currently investing a lot of money in the local area which is driving values up. Estate agents call it an up and coming area which makes me chuckle having lived round this area for most of my life.

210k at the time was fixer upper territory. I should know I've started to receive the invoices for the work being completed on the house. A year down the line a smaller house down the road with 1 less bedroom, on a busier/noisier part of the street and in a similar state to ours sold within a week with an asking price of 265k. What it sold for will be interesting to see.
 
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Well you got the house at the agreed price anyway, so it all worked out.

My point was more that if they really tried to push for a price increase at the last minute, then the only way I'd put up with such underhand tactics and contemplate paying more, would be if I felt the house was very unique.

Otherwise, I'd absolutely refuse to increase the offer and even threaten to reduce it, knowing that I might just have to wait for something similar to become available elsewhere.

The process for buying and selling houses really needs to be sorted out to stop that sort of thing from happening. Once a price is agreed, there should be defined penalties for either side who tries to pull out, or change the agreement after that point. I believe that things are slightly better here in Scotland than England, when it comes to buying and selling, but you can still get messed around a lot if you're unlucky.
 
Oh I agree the whole process of buying residential property is a nightmare and needs to be looked at. The fact is as a buyer you are at the mercy of the seller/chain. I suppose the only saving grace is that over the years you will most likely be on both sides of the fence.
 
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