Ask an estate agent anything

[Fast Bug]

When we bought our current house the vendors were home, they pretty much followed us around during the whole viewing. We requested another viewing without them being home, turned up and they were sat in the gaden which was better, but hardly ideal!

[anonymous-user]

How much room for negotiation is there on a sale?
My sister has found a 2 bed semi detached in London for 500k.
The windows are all misted/glazing is shot.
The kitchen ceiling has traces of asbestos.
No dpc to the kitchen extension.
I estimate the issues to be around 20k worth of repairs from the home buyers report.
Can this be used to negotiate the house price to accommodate for those repairs?

[Pit Pony]

Super_G said:

How much room for negotiation is there on a sale?
My sister has found a 2 bed semi detached in London for 500k.
The windows are all misted/glazing is shot.
The kitchen ceiling has traces of asbestos.
No dpc to the kitchen extension.
I estimate the issues to be around 20k worth of repairs from the home buyers report.
Can this be used to negotiate the house price to accommodate for those repairs?

I'm not an agent. You can ask. You can demand. If the lender won't release the money until they are done, that's the only real lever. Take a hit, or we can't buy it. Sorry.

[KTF]

Super_G said:

How much room for negotiation is there on a sale?
My sister has found a 2 bed semi detached in London for 500k.
The windows are all misted/glazing is shot.
The kitchen ceiling has traces of asbestos.
No dpc to the kitchen extension.
I estimate the issues to be around 20k worth of repairs from the home buyers report.
Can this be used to negotiate the house price to accommodate for those repairs?

You can offer what you like. Make your offer and justify it based on the above to see what happens.

[RizzoTheRat]

But it all depend how many other people are interested and what they're willing to pay. We recently offered 30k over the asking price on a place that needed 15k or so work done, but someone else offered more. The market here however is mad (about to offer 45k over asking price on another place!), if the market's a lot quieter and they're struggling to sell you've got a lot more chance.

[jamm13dodger]

Pit Pony said:

If 2 estate agents give a valuation that is wildly different.
£340k advertise for £350k will be difficult to sell its a fixer upper, verses £390 advertise for £400k, we have loads of people interested in this style of house. In this area in this street even. Needing a new kitchen and bathroom won't make any difference.
Which would you trust more?

Is Agent 2 known for overpricing to get the sellers signed up and then reducing over a few months? You can check other properties they sell on rightmove with the Property Tracker plugin in Chrome. If you see a pattern of every house they market being gradually reduced in price to what you consider a more normal price for the area you have your answer.

[2gins]

jamm13dodger said:

Pit Pony said:

If 2 estate agents give a valuation that is wildly different.
£340k advertise for £350k will be difficult to sell its a fixer upper, verses £390 advertise for £400k, we have loads of people interested in this style of house. In this area in this street even. Needing a new kitchen and bathroom won't make any difference.
Which would you trust more?

Is Agent 2 known for overpricing to get the sellers signed up and then reducing over a few months? You can check other properties they sell on rightmove with the Property Tracker plugin in Chrome. If you see a pattern of every house they market being gradually reduced in price to what you consider a more normal price for the area you have your answer.

There's generally 2 strategies. 1) Price high and hope someone loves it, or loves it enough to negotiate down to your 'go on, then' price. or 2) price lower, get lots of people over the door and let competition do it's thing.

But. If you go in too high, you'll lose interest because buyers will think you're off your nut and a nightmare to deal with and will stay away. Then once you've reduced, everyone will see it's been knocked down and think 'ah, they're struggling to sell, they'll take an offer', so you get offers below the reduced price and it's hard to come back from there if there isn't the competition.

Get several valuations, look at the agent's track records, make the place look as good as it can, price it sensibly based on your info.

[a311]

2gins said:

jamm13dodger said:

Pit Pony said:

If 2 estate agents give a valuation that is wildly different.
£340k advertise for £350k will be difficult to sell its a fixer upper, verses £390 advertise for £400k, we have loads of people interested in this style of house. In this area in this street even. Needing a new kitchen and bathroom won't make any difference.
Which would you trust more?

Is Agent 2 known for overpricing to get the sellers signed up and then reducing over a few months? You can check other properties they sell on rightmove with the Property Tracker plugin in Chrome. If you see a pattern of every house they market being gradually reduced in price to what you consider a more normal price for the area you have your answer.

There's generally 2 strategies. 1) Price high and hope someone loves it, or loves it enough to negotiate down to your 'go on, then' price. or 2) price lower, get lots of people over the door and let competition do it's thing.

But. If you go in too high, you'll lose interest because buyers will think you're off your nut and a nightmare to deal with and will stay away. Then once you've reduced, everyone will see it's been knocked down and think 'ah, they're struggling to sell, they'll take an offer', so you get offers below the reduced price and it's hard to come back from there if there isn't the competition.

Get several valuations, look at the agent's track records, make the place look as good as it can, price it sensibly based on your info.

Good summary IMO. As the OP has said a good agent will have a strategy in place in the event after X weeks a place isn't getting offers otherwise a unrealistic asking price can be very damaging as rhe above lays out.

A seller of a property we were interested in falls into this category. On the market for over 12 months now, originally for 475k, dropped to 450k when we viewed it and offered 415k which was declined and since dropped to 440k. You'd expect you'd get sick to the back teeth of doing vewings for that length of time and concede your asking is too high. Everything else is going Sold STC in a maximum of 2 weeks.

[essayer]

Do estate agents deliberately put the pin on the Rightmove map in the wrong place

[anonymous-user]

Why do a certain well known high street estate agent never put their adverts on Rightmove "under offer" even after an offer has been accepted?

[FiF]

Pricing low, yuck. We had bought a new build off plan, one of first houses to be sold, had negotiated what we thought was a decent discount on the basis our place already sold, all ducks in a row regarding finance, legal side etc.

Then our sale fell through. Hadn't managed to re-sell by time a builder's deadline came up which meant we then had ten weeks to exchange.

Builder had a scheme whereby if a problem like this arose, they sent round three surveyors to give a sale price, average of those would be what they would agree was your selling price, then they would market it, and would keep reducing the price to the point the place was sold, but would also reduce the price of the new build so that the difference between sale and purchase price was the same as agreed.

Surveyors all agreed that our sale price was spot on. Then they started reducing the price using our agent. Two things, began to wonder just how much bigger discount could have negotiated. Second thing our selling price got reduce by so much that the place was clearly a bargain. Agent did absolutely no screening of viewers and we got a irritating succession of folks viewing who clearly had zero chance of exchanging within the deadline, not got property marketed, still got ongoing construction work to finish before marketing. Absolute pain in the rear end.

Pricing low to the extreme admittedly.

[The Moose]

Super_G said:

How much room for negotiation is there on a sale?
My sister has found a 2 bed semi detached in London for 500k.
The windows are all misted/glazing is shot.
The kitchen ceiling has traces of asbestos.
No dpc to the kitchen extension.
I estimate the issues to be around 20k worth of repairs from the home buyers report.
Can this be used to negotiate the house price to accommodate for those repairs?

With the repairs, if it's worth 600k then nothing and it'll go over asking.

With the repairs, if it's worth 400k then probably a good chunk.

[Countdown]

The Moose said:

Super_G said:

How much room for negotiation is there on a sale?
My sister has found a 2 bed semi detached in London for 500k.
The windows are all misted/glazing is shot.
The kitchen ceiling has traces of asbestos.
No dpc to the kitchen extension.
I estimate the issues to be around 20k worth of repairs from the home buyers report.
Can this be used to negotiate the house price to accommodate for those repairs?

With the repairs, if it's worth 600k then nothing and it'll go over asking.

With the repairs, if it's worth 400k then probably a good chunk.

Kind of obvious when you put it like that

[z4RRSchris]

rah1888 said:

z4RRSchris said:

im a developer, agents i suspect will be gone in 5 years,

That was being said 15 years ago.

z4RRSchris said:

the market is moving away from them quickly.

The opposite is probably more accurate. Larger, corporate structured firms of agents becoming less common, smaller independent, specialised agents gaining popularilty.

just my opinion, ive got a billion quid of resi to sell,

[Pit Pony]

Pit Pony said:

DanL said:

Pit Pony said:

If 2 estate agents give a valuation that is wildly different.
£340k advertise for £350k will be difficult to sell its a fixer upper, verses £390 advertise for £400k, we have loads of people interested in this style of house. In this area in this street even. Needing a new kitchen and bathroom won't make any difference.
Which would you trust more?

Get a third opinion.

How “bad” are the kitchen and bathroom? If they’re smart enough, but just not fashionable (but not unfashionable enough to need replacing) then they may not make a difference to price, but rather to desirability. This is speaking as a reasonably recent buyer - liveable stuff that just wasn’t to my taste was fine. Doors hanging off / stuff not working would make me want a discount.

Is it possible that your property is in the “sweet spot” for one agent, and isn’t what the other would usually deal with, hence the difference?

Feels like one is pricing for a quick-ish sale, the other is pricing on the assumption it’ll find the right buyer in time.

It's clean and tidy and functional. But 1970s Schribber kitchen and hideous brown tiling in the original 1960s bathroom.

Painted in old people's taste, but in a 5 year cycle, so there's probably 9 layers of paint on the wood chip.

You could move in and it would be like living in 1980.

So quick update. Based on advice from my wife (who once worked as a part time weekend negotiator, for black horse agencies on 3.50 quid an hour, (in about 2002) and my nephew who is a Sales negotiator in South Liverpool, for a chain that doesn't cover North Liverpool, his Uncle, my wife's brother put his parents home on the Market for £395k.
It never made it to right move.
They've accepted an offer for £390k. But need to take it straight off the market.
The people have got a first time buyer for thier house, so as small a chain as you can have.
The agent for both houses is the same.

Would the OP see this as an obvious conflict of interest? It's clear that this one sale is worth 2 sales to them, so why was this the first viewer? I wonder.

I'm keeping my cynical views hidden from my wife, because she had a meltdown, when I said "Well that's good"
Apparently I might as well have said "Well, you hated that house anyway, and now we can have a new kitchen, and I can have a Monaro"
Who knew that the house she lived in from age 2 until 18 and her parents lived in for 52 years held so much emotion.... I'm not Aspergers, but sometimes I need an excuse for missing the obvious.

[surveyor]

Pit Pony said:

Pit Pony said:

DanL said:

Pit Pony said:

If 2 estate agents give a valuation that is wildly different.
£340k advertise for £350k will be difficult to sell its a fixer upper, verses £390 advertise for £400k, we have loads of people interested in this style of house. In this area in this street even. Needing a new kitchen and bathroom won't make any difference.
Which would you trust more?

Get a third opinion.

How “bad” are the kitchen and bathroom? If they’re smart enough, but just not fashionable (but not unfashionable enough to need replacing) then they may not make a difference to price, but rather to desirability. This is speaking as a reasonably recent buyer - liveable stuff that just wasn’t to my taste was fine. Doors hanging off / stuff not working would make me want a discount.

Is it possible that your property is in the “sweet spot” for one agent, and isn’t what the other would usually deal with, hence the difference?

Feels like one is pricing for a quick-ish sale, the other is pricing on the assumption it’ll find the right buyer in time.

It's clean and tidy and functional. But 1970s Schribber kitchen and hideous brown tiling in the original 1960s bathroom.

Painted in old people's taste, but in a 5 year cycle, so there's probably 9 layers of paint on the wood chip.

You could move in and it would be like living in 1980.

So quick update. Based on advice from my wife (who once worked as a part time weekend negotiator, for black horse agencies on 3.50 quid an hour, (in about 2002) and my nephew who is a Sales negotiator in South Liverpool, for a chain that doesn't cover North Liverpool, his Uncle, my wife's brother put his parents home on the Market for £395k.
It never made it to right move.
They've accepted an offer for £390k. But need to take it straight off the market.
The people have got a first time buyer for thier house, so as small a chain as you can have.
The agent for both houses is the same.

Would the OP see this as an obvious conflict of interest? It's clear that this one sale is worth 2 sales to them, so why was this the first viewer? I wonder.

I'm keeping my cynical views hidden from my wife, because she had a meltdown, when I said "Well that's good"
Apparently I might as well have said "Well, you hated that house anyway, and now we can have a new kitchen, and I can have a Monaro"
Who knew that the house she lived in from age 2 until 18 and her parents lived in for 52 years held so much emotion.... I'm not Aspergers, but sometimes I need an excuse for missing the obvious.

There is the alternative that they know the market and have done an exceptional job of selling two houses, one of them at least very effectively.

No way to win on this game!

[Pit Pony]

surveyor said:

There is the alternative that they know the market and have done an exceptional job of selling two houses, one of them at least very effectively.

No way to win on this game!

To be clear. I'm absolutely sure it's what the house is worth. And 2 fees rather than one is going to.make the agent work harder, to ensure a smooth sale.

Do agents get pissed off with probate sales, where son in laws question thier ethics and stir the st.
To be clear I'm keeping my mouth shut.

[swanseaboydan]

I was an estate agent for 5 years - never again, the general public are a nightmare to deal with, everyone thinks their house is worth more than it is . . It really is one of the toughest jobs in the uk.

[cayman-black]

essayer said:

Do estate agents deliberately put the pin on the Rightmove map in the wrong place

miles out!

[rah1888]

z4RRSchris said:

just my opinion, ive got a billion quid of resi to sell,

That's about 5 of your flats, isn't it?