Previous Offers

O

oceanclub

Guest
Your thoughts please,

Recently, there was a house with an asking price of €X shown on a certain web site online. After viewing, we liked it, so after a week or so of thinking, we decided we'd ring up and perhaps make an offer, first finding out if there were any current offers.

When I did, I was told there were : one for X - 10K, and one for X - 20K. Since we didn't feel in the current climate that we should make an offer higher than this (in fact, what we had hoped to do was make an X - 50 offer!), we decided to just wait and see.

A few weeks later I received an email showing that the price of the house had been dropped 15K. Now, I find this very odd, since supposedly there was one offer _above_ this price previously, and another within sniffing distance (5K) which surely could have closed the deal; heck, they could have split the difference.

Am I right in being suspicious about the supposed existing offers? Or am I just far too cynical about people trying to do a hard job in a tough climate?
 
Yes I think you should be suspicious. There's a lot of this going on at the moment.

I liked the look of a house valued at 920k but was too much for me. I rang the agent and they said there was an offer just below the asking price but the vendor wanted to hold out for a higher offer. Now a few weeks later the house is still for sale and also advertised for rent on Daft.

I don't believe there was ever an offer on the house in the first place. I was lead to believe that offer was around 900,000 so I thought the vendors were mad not to accept....
 
if you believe the house is worth x - 50 offer that all they can do is reject it
 
By and large vendors always believe theres more money in the pot and they usually hold out for money, so what probably happened was a reasonable offer came in and the vendor held out for more and said offer was then withdrawn or that person decided to move on. There is no need to be suspicious in any instance cause as the last guy said you should always go by your valuation and your own limits. If you want it bid what you want its up to you.
 

But that doesn't really explain why they then dropped the price, does it? I can understand the vendor getting offers of X - 20 and X - 10 but of course not accepting and holding out for their original asking price.

But why holding out a mere week or two, would the vendor then drop the price below 1 of these offers and just above the other one?

It doesn't make sense.
 
People are a rightfully paranoid about ficticious bids by the seller or their estate agents. I'd say a far bigger problem at the moment is people pulling out of sales. If I had bid €900k on a property 3 months ago and contracts were not signed I know what I'd do now!
I was aghast at the gazumping culture a few years ago, but when it's a €50k difference in your bank balance and legal, principles fly out the window.
At the end of the day no bid is certain until the contracts are signed
 
It seems reasonable to me that one might lower the price by 15K if you had buyers that walked away with offers in the region of 20K-10K below asking.

It seems a bit convulted to have made that story up. Why wouldn't the EA have just said there was an offer of -10K. No need to add a second fictitious bidder in my opinion.
 
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