Buying Our First Home - Putting In An Offer

Following my previous post about choosing a home

- which you can read here -

This post talks you through our experience of putting in offers and negotiations.

So there were two houses we liked and wanted to put offers on. One was similar to the house we had previously put an offer in but was on the market at a much higher price. The other was a small cottage which needed work doing on the kitchen to make it bigger.

Using Zoopla we were able to find out what prices they were bought for by the current vendors. I found Zoopla really useful but at the end of the day you have to make a decision based on how much the house is worth to you and what you can afford. Using Zoopla we realised that one of the houses had been purchased 7 years ago for more than we were able to offer for it, this meant that we were prepared and expected to be rejected, but we felt it was worth a shot anyway!

Both offers we put in were under the asking price by at least 7.5%. On the larger house because this was the top of our budget and on the smaller because of the work that we would need to do on the kitchen. We also offered fairly low on the smaller property so that we wouldn't have to pay stamp duty.

The offer on the larger property got rejected pretty quickly, which we had expected, so we told them that that was as high as we could go and that if they changed their mind they had our number.

The offer on the smaller property was also rejected, but we were willing to increase our offer by quite a bit on this property so were willing to negotiate. As this is the first time we have bought a house we went to our parents for advise on negotiating. My dad suggested that we offer a larger amount which would cover the cost of some of the simpler work we wanted doing on the house, plus a bit more, as long as the vendor did the smaller jobs for us (putting in the wood-burner and a new carpet in the living room). This offer was also rejected and the agent said that the vendor wanted an extra £1,000, however this would mean we then had to pay stamp duty. I told her we were unsure about this and she spoke to the vendor who then accepted our first offer!

We couldn't believe it! We put in that offer as a bit of a punt and were really surprised and overjoyed it got accepted. The lower price means that we will be able to do some of the work we need to do sooner than we thought we would and our mortgage is obviously a lot smaller than we were anticipating.

Next steps: Finding a solicitor and sorting out the mortgage!

Putting in offers on the properties was so scary, especially the thought of negotiating. But remember that there are always people you can ask for advice and taking your time isn't a bad thing.

Have any of you had experience of negotiating with vendors? What is your advice?

Bella x