Dont hesitate, call the estate agents and ask them for a sit rep. Have you got a buyer for your house - our estate agents told us we wouldn't be taken seriously unless we had sold ours (we are in the process of selling and buying).
Maybe I'm being paranoid but it's 38 years since we moved in here and I'm not au fait with modern practices.
I believe the estate agent has a legal responsibility to pass on to the vendor any and all offers made on their property - but are the prospective buyers afforded the same courtesy?
We made a (cheeky) offer on a property on Monday but have heard nothing since. The least I would have expected would have been "Piss off you cheeky gits" with an invitation to amend our offer upwards, but nothing at all has come back from the agents.
I'm wondering if the agents are deliberately keeping us out of the loop now and letting other people view and offer, before we get a second chance. We fully expected (and are more than willing) to come up nearer to the asking price. Surely that's the whole point of negotiation?
What would you do? Contact the agent again and ask what's going on or just sit tight and wait?
Yes they must pass on all offers...
- but are the
If the agent is any good they should get you a response fairly quickly.
Depending on what discussion they have had with the vendors, they might automatically reject an offers below a certain amount automatically - so those answers come very fast!
In the current market I would expect the answer might be be "not enough" make a better offer, or "possibly, but it is not enough to have us take it off the market.
(it will depend on your position - a lower offer from a cash buyer with no chain may be more attractive to the vendor than asking price, with mortgage in principle, and a chain and with their property sold, which in turn might be preferable to over the asking price, but prospective buyer as yet unsold and no mortgage offer. Depends on how long they can/want to wait.
Remember it is a sellers market at the moment. Lots of sales are going to "best and final" offers when there are multiple buyers interested. The most sought after properties are often selling the moment they go on the market.
Yup contact them - they might just be incompetent!
Assuming you are not in Scotland you need to check exactly how the price was stated. I bought this property last November and the prices was stated as offers above £x. On viewing day I was no. 16 in the queue and there were 5 more after me. I had to make an offer after the 15 minute viewing to stay in the game.
A couple of days later I was told one offer was more than mine but the purchaser had a property to sell. Two other people had made the same offers as me, did I want to increase my offer? I said yes and made a higher offer. Again a couple of days later a similar situation but this would be last and final offer and vendor would make a decision. I offered them 10 percent above the £x and got it because I was sold and the money was with my solicitor.
I've no idea what the market is like now but probably still over heated?
When we were house-hunting about 4 years ago, we lost a couple of houses which went to best-and-final-offers and we think we were probably outbid by people moving from the south where house prices are higher to the north where the price of a southern semi will buy a northern detached house. Fair enough: not a lot we can do about it.
But it was frustrating to look a couple of years later on houseprices.com to see what those houses actually sold for, and to find that they sold for less than our rejected bid. I imagine people were putting in ridiculously high bids to secure the houses, and then negotiating downwards once there was no longer any competition on the grounds of problems with surveys. Most vendors will tend to hang onto the buyer that they have, even when the buyer starts to impose conditions and to insist on a lower price, rather than reject the sale and put the house back on the market.
Still, none of the houses we saw were anywhere near as good as the house that we ended up with: ideal house and garden, with distance from my wife's work being the only disadvantage - and Covid has meant that she will be able to work from home for the foreseeable future: there was no insistence on people returning to the office once all the lockdown restrictions and the high infection rates dwindled.
I presume estate agents are not allowed to invent fictitious buyers and hence competition, to make one buyer increase their offer. That any statement "another buyer has offered more than you - do you want to increase your offer" has to be truthful.
I always liked making direct contact with the seller as well as going through the estate agent. Direct lines of communications can speed things up at later stages.
I did not see the original post but the obligation to pass on offers is subject to the seller's instructions - e.g. "don't bother me with offers from cheeky sods that are less than £...".
Also worth following up any oral offer with an email or letter: it's not what you know, it's what you can prove.
Keep on hounding them, I would. Brian
Pal locally is selling at the moment. Was given a low offer on the first day of viewing. Turned down, of course. I'm not sure if the offer was direct to him, or via the agent, though.
As others have said, the agents are legally required to pass on all offers.
However, estate agents are one of the most corrupt businesses, and while they are supposed to be acting for the seller, they are actually out for themselves and not anyone else. They will often not pass on offers which they think might delay or complicate a sale and risk them not getting or delaying their commission. They are usually not bothered about maximising their commission, just getting something as fast as possible.
I was recently involved in selling a house, and we did have a couple of potential buyers come to us directly saying they'd put offers in, which the agent never passed on. We made a record of this in case the agent tried to pull a fast one. They did try charging a higher percentage than agreed, but they corrected it without us having to point out they'd also broken the law, so we didn't need to use that leverage in the end.
Andrew Gabriel
Indeed. If they are not interested in a 'ratchet' commission - x% up to
90% of the asking price and say 5x% on any amount beyond that, then you know that what they want is a quick sale, not the best sale.Squeezing the last 10% out is simply not in their interest.
A lot of estate agents are just shit. I looked at a shop property years ago reduced from 70k to 60, been for sale for AGES and was a bit of a shed so I offered 50k.
The estate agent told me they'd had an offer at 60k, the buyer was sorting finance but if we could match that and move more quickly it could be ours. No ta I said, and left it.
He called me months later (presumably having been nudged by the seller), was quite rude, "well are you still interested or what?", I reminded him he told me it was effective sold which I suspected from the beginning was BS and we paid 50 for it.
I have many other tales, we haven't the time :) , if I was you, i'd chase them.
It might be worth putting your offer in writing to the EA, also leave a copy for the Vendor at their home.
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