after years of not owning and living in our own house and years of saving a deposit….We absolutely loved it. Gushed to the seller we would pay the asking price. Hope we have not jumped the gun.

Let see what happens when me make the official offer the estate agents tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Play it cool, Rodney, play it cool… The first rule of house buying club:

Do not let on to the agent/vendor how much you LOVE the property.

(Good luck by the way!)

Put emotion away in a little box in your brain, it’s a business deal, not a personal thing until you’ve got the keys and moved in.

We just put an offer in, although 10k less than asking…at least it will pay for the stamp duty!

The first rule of buying a house is there is ALWAYS another house.

But not always when you need it

The good ones go fast. Do you know the area and prices well? We looked at dozens so when this one came on we knew straight away it was right for us and a bargain. We put a full asking price offer in while viewing it. No regrets, very happy with it.

where you need it or one you like as much

If you love it then pay enough to get it

It is all haggling and if you love it then make sure you get it

I paid more than I wanted for money but the location and size was the best I would get on my budget

So we went into the estate agents and offered the asking Price 250 K, got a pretty sharpish call later saying he had another offer and we should make our best and final offer by 1 pm tomorrow. Said it would stay the same. Lets see what happens 🙂

The infamous fake other offer. Funny how that works isnt it

Best offers now 240k 😉

Id of said 240k play tour games with someone else.

trail_rat – Member
The infamous fake other offer. Funny how that works isnt it

Best offers now 240k

parkesie – Member
Id of said 240k play tour games with someone else.

I was very very tempted, however as mentioned by other posters above, we know the area very well and the price is very good for the area, everything thing else is 270+ which of course adds the extra stamp duty. The property needs 30K ish worth of work on it, but we would probably spend this on any property we bought in the area.

I’d you really want it and decide to offer a little more money, offer its as £5k for “fixtures and fittings” (obviously replace £5k for your amount above £250k).

You don’t pay stamp duty on fixtures and fittings.

Lol good luck getting that through the system these days.

I’d have been tempted with a symbolic reduction of £1. “I know your game Sonny, and I’m not playing”

Fixtures and fittings have to be the value – HMRC are getting pretty strict on it now. You can’t just invent a figure to please yourself.

House buying and selling is tricky. But buying our first house we got a good deal by not being too hard nosed and pretending not to care

Mrs Ampthill being very pregnant helped. Lady selling up gave us her home number and we talked regularly on the phone while the estate agent told us both lies.

We negotiated a good price direct with the owner. She wanted us to have it and knew that we wouldn’t let the sale slip as we were keen to be in for the new baby

sorry double post

Well..We just got the keys champers time 🙂

Congratulations !

nice one! remember the first meal in a new house has to be a takeaway, it’s the law. Also, now’s the time to buy a new tele and ps3/4 etc etc. It’s the only time you’ll get away with it.

nice one! remember the first meal in a new house has to be a takeaway, it’s the law. Also, now’s the time to buy a new tele and ps3/4 etc etc. It’s the only time you’ll get away with it.

And, in my case, a motorbike 🙂

Good work!!! I should be getting the keys to mine on Tuesday!

(PS3 ordered this morning and hopefully in the post over the weekend!)

Congrats!

Also, now’s the time to buy a new tele and ps3/4 etc etc

Someone I know ‘panic’ bought a new bike at the same time as the house purchase. Something about the bike cost being insignificant compared to the house and the stress of housing buying etc…. So nows your chance!

We absolutely loved it. Gushed to the seller we would pay the asking price. Hope we have not jumped the gun.

now if it was a bike, then youd want a test ride, negotiatea load of freebies, ask on bike forums about it, look in mags for write ups and a bike costs a few thousand at most. 😯

Strange how lots of people dont do that with a house or home.

congratulations!

Lady selling up gave us her home number and we talked regularly on the phone while the estate agent told us both lies.

This +1000000000.

We moved into our new place about 6 weeks ago and the seller was great – speaking to them directly, rather than via the estate agent, made all the difference when things got a little fraught. Our buyer, on the other hand, despite being given our number and email addresses, wanted to go wholly via (his friend) the estage agent which slowed things down somewhat.

if (and i really hope we don’t) we ever do this again we’ll make a point of going direct to the vendor…

(and yes, it always amazes me that people seem to spend more time thinking about, researching and test driving cars than their houses. Our buyers bought after spending no more than 15 minutes in our place)

the buyers of our last house were great. couldn’t be faulted. still friends with them really.

the day they got the keys, they were out of town until late, by which time lawyers office had shut. we in turn were gone, moved. We chatted with the buyers and I left a set of keys with a friend, and let him know the cash had come through. Buyers collected keys from him later that evening, everyone happy (though solicitor would have had kittens I suspect).

http://www.oft.gov.uk/about-the-oft/legal-powers/legal/estate-agents-act/handling-negotiations#.UnQEo5GByD4

Estate Agents claiming that there are other offers are actually breaking the law, basically it is fraud. How you prove these fake offers are fake… not so sure. I had the same thing on the house i bought a couple of months back. It is remarkable how there is always another offer on the table even if the house has been on the market for months.

Bunch of ****s

Just curious as I am in the US, but what is the stamp tax mentioned in the thread?

Stamp duty is what bum rapes you when you buy a house…..

Seriously though, it is a tax you pay on the sale value to the government. It’s a bit like goods tax, but you (the new buyer) pay it every time the property is bought. It’s value starts at 2% I think, moving to 5% for the big mansions..

I’ve been viewing places recently, and have dealt with a number of different agents. Only one so far seems to be a ‘typical’ estate agent telling me that if I see his mortgage advisor, who apparently get some of the best rates available!, will put me on his “priority list” so I can know of properties before they appear on Rightmove etc.

When I spoke to his mortgage advisor on the phone his response was ‘If your happy with your mortgage no point in wasting my time or yours coming to see me’. Mr estate agent seemed miffed when I told him of his colleagues response, and was still trying to get an appointment out of me. Little p****.

Thanks Sui
Our collective governments can always seem to find a way to get their hands on our cash one way or another.

Here in New Mexico, when a house is sold, the county property tax authority does an update on the property valuation (which over time usually lags behind where it should be) and the new owners sometimes get an unpleasant shock when the first year’s property tax comes due.

Busy dog, we have that as well in year format, and again is based on the value of your house (although lagging behind by a good few years), it’s called council tax (municipal tax I suppose for you chaps), normally around 1500 to 3000 per year. These things pay for all of the local “services” we get, like bins and roads cleaned….

Lady selling up gave us her home number and we talked regularly on the phone while the estate agent told us both lies.

This +1000000000.

Indeed. Ours were shysters of the highest order. The previous owners were really nice people though and we still see them every now and again. They popped round quite a few times after we’d moved in to make sure everything was alright. (Or see how we were changing the place)

These things pay for all of the local “services” we get, like bins and roads cleaned….

Police, fire service, road maintenance, lighting etc etc.

Sui, the property tax here is used the same way as your council tax and is based on property value as well, ranging from about 1K to 4K per year on “normal” houses and much higher on the high-end homes.
The instantaneous ramp on property tax on sale is “affectionately” know as “tax lightning”.

Yes forgot plod and co. Though isn’t a lot of that from central government as well?

not sure of the meaning of your acronyms “plod” and “co” ??

Most comes from local taxes I believe. If an area has a particularly difficult set of circumstances, the police can apply for a government grant to help sort it out.

plod == police.

co, well, just their friends (likely to mean fire service and the liek in this case)